Your Second Home Building a Library
Books to Browse or to Savor


By STEVE BAILEY
Writing in The New York Times, January 4, 2008

READING is part of getting away for many people, whether it’s packing a couple of paperbacks for a Caribbean vacation or browsing the bookshelf on a rainy Saturday at a friend’s country house. Indeed, built-in bookshelves and rooms called libraries are common amenities in vacation-home properties.

If you’re staring at empty shelves in your new weekend home, you should ask yourself some questions before taking your credit card into the little bookstore in the village. For whom are you buying books? And for what purpose? If they’re to be merely decorative, you’re probably best off buying secondhand hardbacks. Don’t forget the oversize art books for those tall bottom shelves.
If they’re for you and your family, well, you should know what you want. You don’t have to stick to books that can be finished in a weekend because it’s perfectly O.K. for books to go back and forth between your houses. If you want books that your guests will find diverting, however, that’s a different matter altogether.

Grandparents should keep some children’s books around, appropriate to the ages of the grandchildren. Don’t expect an 11-year-old to enjoy Golden Books, not even the ones that were favorites three or four years ago. If grandparents are going to be the guests, then you should have books that they might enjoy grazing in: photo books of places they’ve lived in or visited, maybe art books or military histories or books on their hobbies.

If you anticipate a diverse universe of guests, you can open up the range of subjects, but you should try to stick to two broad categories: books that are good for flipping through, whether it’s a copy of Madonna’s “Sex” or a Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert civics text, and books that can be dipped into satisfyingly, perhaps a collection of Auden’s poetry or Welty’s short stories. Whatever your efforts, you get to see the interaction between your guests and your books.
At one Manhattan couple’s weekend home in the Catskills, books seem to have a life of their own. Molly Stern, the editorial director for fiction at Viking/Penguin, and Jay Mandel, a literary agent at William Morris, have a restored farmhouse on 50 acres in Jeffersonville in Sullivan County, N.Y., where, not surprisingly, they have a lot of books. They also have frequent house guests and sometimes lend the house to friends.

The attic loft houses what Ms. Stern calls “well-loved” books, like a first edition of “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith. Children’s books are on the second floor. The first floor has books on gardening and cooking “as well as tabloid magazines and newspapers.” As a counterpoint to the rural setting, they keep handy a copy of “The Works: Anatomy of a City” by Kate Asher. Other favorites include the crime novels of George Pelecanos.
“It’s great to see what happens to books when you’re not there,” Ms. Stern said. “Lorrie Moore’s ‘Birds of America’ migrates from the loft to a bedroom. John Cheever frequently finds his way into a guest room.” One time, Ms. Stern said, she arrived at the house to find Emily Dickinson waiting to be read in the master bedroom.

When she’s at someone else’s house, Ms. Stern said, she’s always happy to see books that she published on the bookshelf, “especially in second homes because that’s their sanctuary.” And if she’s looking for something to read, she looks for short stories by Lorrie Moore or Alice Munro or perhaps an art book. “I was at someone’s house and got pulled into a book, a retrospective of Irving Penn photographs,” she said, “something I probably wouldn’t have picked up anywhere else.”

Not every visitor, though, will be checking out the host’s library. The historian Taylor Branch says his wife, Christy, prefers novels and nonfiction about natural disasters, and he generally goes for history and occasionally gets on “fiction kicks like reading the entire Patrick O’Brian series.” But don’t stock the shelves for their visit. “We usually take books with us when we travel,” Mr. Branch said