A few years before we built our present home, President Hinckley spoke of the library in his boyhood home. Since then glimpses of it have appeared in various talks and books where he has told of it's lofty windows, solid table, statuary, and, of course, reading materials. From its first mention, the idea resonated with us. We would instead opt for that lofty haven of peace that President Hinckley had described. Reading and studying are not only sufficiently clean activities for a front room, but add a degree of cozy warmth that mere furnishings cannot achieve.
Home is, among other things, a configuration of space.
The way that space is organized and supplied promotes certain principles and activities. Whether the family budget and circumstances allow for a library to be a room or only a modest bookshelf and a place to sit, the affect is much the same. And for the first two years that we lived in the house, we used that label whenever we referred to that part of the house. This resulted in some very interesting expressions on the faces of guests invited to step into a virtually book-free room. And what they didn't know, too, was that on the floor just below the library, moving cartons full of books were stacked in a kind of alluvial deposit that shifted unpredictably with tides of order and accumulation flowing through the basement.