For many of us, books are a pleasure, an escape; evidence of our personal history and development; a way to explore other worlds but also to settle into corners of ourselves that we don’t often spend time in: interests we’ve been meaning to get back to, context for places we’ve been to or want to visit, other works by an author we’ve discovered. As Philip Blackwell, the founder of Ultimate Library, one of the UK’s top library curation services, says, “The books on people’s shelves are a window into their soul.”
But about 200,000 books are published every year in Britain alone, and we don’t always have the time to seek out the most rewarding, enriching volumes.
This is where library curators come in: book wizards, whose immense knowledge and broad contacts allow them, after a bit of careful probing, to craft a bespoke library that feels like, well, you — the best version of you, without any of the overmarketed rubbish you might have accidentally acquired, but a collection that will still surprise and delight.
The library at KYN Hurlingham in southwest London was designed by Heywood Hill
Heywood Hill
From its tiny Mayfair bookshop in a Georgian townhouse, which is exactly as temptingly jampacked and creaky of floorboard as it should be, Heywood Hill has been creating and enhancing libraries for private homes, jets, yachts and embassies for nearly 90 years.
Here they do about 25 to 30 every year, says Zoe Dickey, chief operating officer and head of libraries, “and every project is completely bespoke, so no two are ever the same”. As with all library services, she adds, “there are boring practicalities, which are very important”. But shelf measurements and architectural plans are only the beginning. For her, the purpose of a library is as important as its size.
“Is this somewhere you’re going to be entertaining? Do you want books that reflect the location of the house, and does that mean that you want books that reflect the landscape? And are you going to be going on walks and want to come back and there to be a book that will show you the flower you saw? But then, do you want murder mysteries that are set in that place — and who is reading them? Are you going to have guests who might be with you for a few days, and do you want something they can pick off your shelves and get enjoyment out of for those two nights that they’re reading for 30 minutes, or something they can browse before drinks? Those conversations with clients are so fun.”
And then there are the books themselves. Heywood Hill’s projects have included finding every aviation memoir from the 20th century (there are about 1,500, apparently), a collection on the Atlantic slave trade, one exploring “the positive story of humanity”, another on the history of English architecture. One client asked them to fill her house with books she should read before she dies. Heywood Hill’s bookseller-in-chief Nicky Dunne mentions (but doesn’t name) a hedge-fund business that ordered a reading library for staff with the theme “capitalism: the good, the bad and the ugly”.
The costs vary wildly, depending on the rarity of the books and size of the project but, Dunne tells me, they tend to start somewhere in the region of £10,000. Over the past few months, the average value has been £50,000 per project in places from Paris to Dubai.
As well as for the books you are, of course, paying for the research required to make the collection the best it can possibly be. “We were once asked for a shelf of books on dragonflies — a big shelf too,” Dunne says. “Often we know about a subject — the great American novel we can have a good crack at. But sometimes we really don’t. And if you’ve got a subject, we want to make sure you’ve got the right books, the important work, the really interesting stuff.
“In that particular case, I went to look for the right academic, someone who is holding symposia on that subject, a connected academic in that field. I got hold of somebody in Birmingham, Alabama, told him what I was after, and a couple of weeks later he sent me a spreadsheet of his shelves on the subject and was then able to advise me on it. Information may be very plentiful these days, but you need it to be informed and if we can’t do it ourselves, then we go to people who can.”
heywoodhill.com
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FRITZ VON DER SCHULENBURG/THE INTERIOR ARCHIVE/TRUNK ARCHIVE
A Room of Your Own
Max Moorhouse has worked with a number of other library curation services (it’s a small world) but has recently struck out on his own, first with a podcast — A Room of Your Own, in which he talks to artists, writers and designers about the rooms and books they’ve loved and thrived in, building a picture of their dream library — then as an independent curator, with a particular specialism in gift libraries for children.
So it’s perhaps surprising to find that, as a child, Moorhouse wasn’t a particularly avid reader. He noticed, while working as an English teacher and then as a curator, “that a lot of parents are very anxious about making mini-readers, making sure that their kids are in love with books from an early age”. But that, he thinks, might be the wrong approach. “I have the example of myself, who absolutely loves books, has made a career out of books, but didn’t grow up with the love of reading.” To him, “what’s much more important is to give a child the opportunity to be surrounded by books, so that they’re used to having them around, and if a spark comes along where they are interested in something, they have something they can turn to.”
As well as a Very Beginnings selection of 20 books, aimed at new parents and designed for reading aloud (a sweet gift, with a guide price of £275), the core of his business is the Gift Library. A collection of 110 books, starting from a reading age of about six, it has been created “to see [a child] through towards university age, when you really start to read on your own terms and decide what it is that you’re interested in.”
The process starts with a consultation with the parents — and sometimes the child — to establish what it is they want from the library, what values are important to them, to find out more about the child and to identify some of the parents’ own favourites from childhood. “People like to pass on the experiences they had themselves with books,” Moorhouse says. “So it’s about balancing some of those classics and old favourites with amazing new writing for children. It’s really nice to blend in the work of these great contemporary children’s authors and relate it to things that their parents might have loved, or a classic. Also things that they’ll study in school and things that will be a reference point to different moments of life and development, or to some of the individual points that I’ve picked up on from them as a family, where they live, who they are.”
The guide price for the Gift Library is £1,950, and Moorhouse thinks of it as “the spine of a reading library. It’s not exhaustive — they’re going to add to it, and they should. But it’s providing that opportunity, and some really important books that can be reference points in your life. Add to them, ignore some of them if you want, but they’re there for you as a resource.”
aroyo.org
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The library at the Fulham Road branch of Peter Harrington Rare Books in southwest London
Peter Harrington Rare Books
Established in 1969 on a stall at Chelsea Antiques Market on the Kings Road by Peter Harrington and now led by his son, Pom, this is the true collectors’ mecca. As well as selling beautiful individual volumes in their elegant stores in Chelsea and Mayfair (gems of their current catalogue include a second edition of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, with a few authorial corrections, for £14,500, and a rare first edition of Oscar Wilde’s Salomé, the first to feature Aubrey Beardsley’s elegant illustrations, for £4,500), Harrington’s has a well-established library curation service that has built and upgraded collections for clients all over the world, identifying and acquiring cornerstone works, filling gaps and finding any elusive items.
Its position as both an active rare book dealer and a library service means that its specialists have the freedom to pursue long-term collecting projects related to specific subjects or sometimes take possession of entire libraries, which can suddenly come in very handy.
The acquisition of a museum-grade collection on Hawaii built up over a decade with more than 1,000 books and printed items meant that when another customer approached the store with an interest in the island, they were able to offer it, fully catalogued and enhanced with additions (such as a lava sample collection and several cookery books) to be sent back to its country of origin. Pom and the specialist Suzanna Beaupre flew out and spent two days unpacking and installing it in a bespoke space in the client’s home there, “about two miles away from where it started”.
A first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses sourced by Peter Harrington Rare Books
These enhancements come through a process of research and suggestion from Harrington’s team of specialists. “An awful lot of really important books, people won’t know why they should have it, so it’s introducing the concept of why this [or that] would fit into a collection,” Pom says. “For example, if you were looking at science fiction, you want a Frankenstein, of course. Then we might say, what about Polidori? When Mary Shelley and her husband were at Lord Byron’s house on Lake Geneva, they were writing ghost stories and she wrote the concept of Frankenstein. Polidori was another author there, and he wrote The Vampyre. It absolutely fits in with it.”
Other clients have included the fashion designer Kim Jones, who has one of the world’s most extensive private collections of items related to the Bloomsbury set (he owns as many as ten first editions of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando). People come to Harrington because they’re interested in books as objects as well as repositories of information and art; they want the best and most beautiful version of a book that can be found. The Chelsea Bindery, which creates gorgeous book boxes to protect them, is an offshoot of the business, and every volume comes with a little guide on how to look after it.
The price of rare books can vary significantly, but the library service begins at a baseline of £250 per linear foot. “You can build a very elegant entry-point library at that price,” Pom says. For those desiring something like 19th-century library sets or fine leather bindings and rarer editions, pricing can scale up to nearly four times that. “Beyond that, the possibilities are limitless,” Pom adds. “You are talking about building a legacy library.”
peterharrington.co.uk
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Ultimate Library
Philip Blackwell, a fourth-generation bookseller and publisher, set up Ultimate Library in 2008, inspired by his love of travel and the power of books to bring a destination to life. “I was travelling internationally as a publisher,” he says, “and when you meet up with other fellow travellers in far-flung corners of the world, you always talk about what you’re reading to give you a great sense of place. We’d swap all these stories and I built up a sort of database in my mind.”
After starting with hotels, where he would curate libraries of works grounded in a place that could be easily dipped into over a short stay, the company has expanded into private libraries, with most of the work coming via interior designers. It now operates from a studio-cum-warehouse in Fulham packed with excellent, pristine books — the libraries are exclusively hardback (paperbacks get too tatty, they say). “Part of our mission is to put great books that should be read by everybody into the right people’s hands,” Blackwell states.
Each project starts with a questionnaire, a sort of interactive map or decision tree (“It’s a kind of ‘choose your own adventure’,” explains the chief curator Toby Orton). “It is very much designed to lead people,” Blackwell says. “What do you like reading? What is your education? What are your passions? Is it riding, horses, cars, wine, golf? Do you own a football team? Do you play for a football team?” The last isn’t unheard of. “The Premier League footballers were fun because two of them were like, ‘Don’t make me look like a desperate bachelor’, which was really refreshing,” Orton says. One was fascinated by fashion and had an in-depth knowledge of Southern American country music.
Some collections can be delivered in a day — an interior designer looking for eight metres of books to complete a look, for example — whereas others will take several weeks of discussion and review with a client, whose interest evolves as they get fully engaged in the process.
The work has varied wildly — “nothing’s too big, and nothing’s too small,” Orton says. It can range from a bedside shelf in a villa or on a yacht for as little as £150 to £20-50,000 for a complete library of several hundred volumes, tailored to the client’s specific interests. One client from the film world wanted a library of books of great war films he’d loved, from The Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare onwards. They’ve even built a witchcraft library. On one memorable occasion, Blackwell got a call asking for a library of 15 books, all in Chinese, for a group of Chinese travellers about to embark on a sea voyage to Antarctica. Fortunately one of his team happened to be in Shanghai at the time. “The ability to execute like that gives me great pleasure,” Blackwell says, grinning.
His personal passion, though, is “what to read where in the world”. Many of his clients are seeking a library for a second or maybe third home. “They come to England, they like books — they want to have a collection here. So it’s reflecting their interest, but maybe adding a bit of London just to ground them in a sense of place. Or they’ll come and ask for things for their Austrian ski chalet — they’ll want different things at different houses.”
Blackwell shows me a translation of The Geckos of Bellapais by Joachim Sartorius: “The best book on Cyprus, written by a diplomat about his experience of living there. It’s just an insight into the people, the geography, the tensions. Great writing comes from tension points in history.”
ultimatelibrary.co.uk
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