Writing room

“ I think I should enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to prompt me and to act as audience. The room adjoining this was fitted up for my study. My manuscripts and notes and private books and many of my letters are there, and there are a trunkful or two of such things in the attic. I seldom use the room myself. I do my writing and reading in bed. I will turn that room over to you for this work. Whatever you need will be brought to you. We can have the dictation here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. ”

“ Adjoining the writing-table is a smaller one, on which stands a typewriter. All about the room, on tables and systematically arranged, and suggestive of the strict order imposed by a meticulous mind. There is one door to right, another to left, the latter leading to an inner chamber. On the writing-table lie papers and a portable speaking-tube. A telephone, a waste-paper basket, and a revolving book-stand are within easy reach of the Professor’s chair, while behind it is a screen partly covering the door leading to the inner chamber. ”

“ One of my greatest pleasures, when I am planning the furnishing of a house, is the selection and equipment of the necessary writing-tables. Every room in every house has its own suggestion for an original treatment, and I enjoy working out a plan for a writing-corner that will offer maximum of convenience, and beauty and charm, for in these busy days we need all these qualities for the inspiration of a pleasant note. You see, I believe in proper writing-tables, just as I believe in proper chairs. ”

“ The young men by the door gradually advanced into the middle of the room, and in time became sufficiently at ease to consent to be introduced to partners. The writing-master danced every set, springing about with the most fearful agility, and his wife played a rubber in the back-parlour—a little room with five book-shelves, dignified by the name of the study. ”

“ There's a little quiet corner in the drawing-room. Bring your letter there. I am writing too; and Peter and Nan will be having their romp in the schoolroom."
It was a great treat to be invited into the drawing-room. ”

“ There was a big table in the middle, and smaller tables and chairs about. There was a pleasant little writing-desk for each, well furnished with pretty writing materials. Low bookshelves ran round two sides of the room, and the other side showed a jolly big fireplace, and pleasant windows with deep seats. ”

“ In the center is a rectangular table covered with books, pamphlets and other indications of a literary life. Shelving reaches to the ceiling, and every fraction of space is occupied by volumes of all sizes, from folio to duodecimo; a door on the left opens into a room which is also full to overflowing with the valuable collections of a lifetime; and further on is yet another apartment equally crowded with the historian’s dumb servants, companions, and friends; while rooms and nooks elsewhere have yielded to Literature’s rights of squatter sovereignty. ”

“ It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining; my centre-table, strewn with books and periodicals; my writing-desk with a half-finished poem, in a stanza of my own contrivance; my morning lounge at the reading-room or picture gallery; my noontide walk along the cheery pavement, with the suggestive succession of human faces, and the brisk throb of human life in which I shared; ”

“ It is needless to describe a structure so familiar to all English men of letters as the new Reading Room. The original design, sketched by Mr. Panizzi on April 18, 1852, was submitted to the Trustees on May 5 following. ”

“ How much a neat and carefully arranged shelf of books appeals to one's taste, I need not say, nor urge the point how much an orderly and neatly kept room, or desk, or table adds to one's comfort. The librarian who has the proper spirit of his calling should take pains to make the whole library look neat and attractive, to have a place for everything, and everything in its place. ”

“ We Americans love books—popular books!—and we have had sense enough to bring them into our living-rooms, and enjoy them. But when you begin calling a room a library it should mean something more than a small mahogany bookcase with a hundred volumes hidden behind glass doors. I think there is nothing more amusing than the unused library of the nouveau riche, the pretentious room with its monumental bookcases and its slick area of glass doors and its thousands of unread volumes, caged eternally in their indecent newness. ”

“ Then you turn into the drawing-room, where you find modern conversation and late publications and the prospect of dinner. The new life and the old have melted together: there is no dividing-line. In the drawing-room wall is a queer funnel-shaped hole, with the broad end inward, like a small casemate. ”

“ It is but natural that Inspiration should visit frequently in such an environment; and as a precaution against such an emergency, each contributor's room contains a single operating desk and a large blunt instrument like a typewriter. ”

“ The Library room, in which I was reading, is a large, lofty hall, fitted with dark bookcases, heavy and huge as if for giants, singularly perfect in point of inconvenience and inaccessibility, and good only in that they bore a certain architectural proportion to the great height and expanse of the dark room. ”

“ For here also, the large and stately library, with its nobly designed bookcases—still empty of books—its classical panelling, and embossed ceiling, made a setting of which the miscellaneous plunder within it was not worthy. A man of taste would have conceived the beautiful room itself as suffering from the disorderly uses to which it was put. ”

“ If all the books are in the 'Library' one has to endure the nuisance of demands for particular works, coming from the kitchen, drawing-room, or bedroom, and the difficulty of securing their prompt and accurate return. It also imposes upon the butler, the maid-of-all-work, or whoever admits and attends upon callers, the awful responsibility of procuring from the library a pass-time book to amuse the waiting visitor in the drawing-room. ”

“ Nothing enrages me like having to open a door to get at books."
"It's the room you need," he replied. "You draw all the light to yourself. It gives you color, turns your hair to black, and makes your eyes look like——"
"Mr. Piersoll!" ”

“ In the wide, sunny sitting-room, into which they were ushered by a pleasant-faced maid, low bookcases ran all round the walls, and were not only filled, but heaped with books, the volumes lying in piles along the top. ”

“ The first thing to be done by one who would read a room is, to clear it as soon as possible of the air of the marvellous, the air of the storybook, which pervades every place at the first sight of it. ”

“ In this library, where startling effects of any kind would be out of place, there are no plays of color, but ample light falling upon the exquisitely carved table for writing in the centre, which is the most remarkable for its conveniences and contrivances that I have ever seen. ”

“ THE HOUSEHOLD LIBRARY Every intelligent man, whether an enthusiastic book-lover or not, recognizes that books should form part of the fittings of every room in a house. Whether the apartment be a library, study, parlour, nursery, drawing-room, kitchen, bedroom, dining-room, boudoir, hall, or den, books of a suitable kind should form part of its equipment. ”

“ In these men born to create were at work. The click-click of a typewriter produced a story that would be read by eager millions. The dark-room brought out pictures almost as though by magic. In the art room men created pictures that made men laugh and forget their troubles. ”

“ Then he crossed the room and entered the library. Hall followed and snapped on the switch near the door. The room, while not as handsomely furnished as the living room, was none the less attractive, mahogany and dull green throughout. The walls, from floor to ceiling, were lined with bookcases. It was quite evident that the array of books in the living room merely represented the overflow from the library. The centre table in the library, while massive, was different from that in the living room. ”

“ I wrote so fully in my former book on the arrangement of sitting-rooms that I am only going to touch lightly on the orthodox papering and painting of dining-, drawing-, and morning-rooms, reserving all my new ideas for the billiard-room and library, neither of which rooms were considered likely to be required for the modest young couple starting in life, for whom I more particularly designed that special volume. ”

“ Rooms tell us much of their inhabitants. No one will doubt who remembers the stiff, formal arrangement of the drawing-room 'at school,' where the chairs stood in the primmest rows and couples, and the whole place breathed such an air of strict propriety, that we doubted whether a hearty laugh would not be unbecoming in it ”

“ You must excuse me, sir, and not keep people waiting. This was the living room. The chimney corner remains exactly as it was when Shakespeare was a boy. Have you tickets for the Museum? Those who have will go through that door to the right. This room at the back is the kitchen. If you will ascend the staircase, you will be shown the birth-room. ”

“ Then you go into the drawing-room. You don't light the fire until the last moment, because you want it to be burning brightly when your guests arrive. Your drawing-room looks a little stiff somehow, but an open fire more than anything else makes a room inviting, and you light it just as your first guest rings the bell. ”

“ You can sit also in the room below, in the seat, in the corner of the wide fireplace, that Shakespeare himself must often have occupied. They keep but a few sticks of furniture in any part of the cottage. One room is devoted to Shakespearean relics—more or less authentic; one of which is a schoolboy's desk that was obtained from the old grammar-school in Church Street in which Shakespeare was once a pupil. ”

“ In choosing Paper for a room, avoid that which has a variety of colors, or a large, showy figure, as no furniture can appear to advantage with such. Large figured papering makes a small room look smaller. ”

“ If I feared not trouble more than cost I might easily join a convenient gallery of a hundred paces long and twelve broad on each side of this room, and upon the same floor, the walls being already of a convenient height. Each retired place requireth a walk. If I sit long my thoughts are prone to sleep. My mind goes not alone as if legs moved it. Those who study without books are all in the same case. ”

“ I was collecting my books, I said, to carry them into the other room, where there was a little shelf with a curtain in front on purpose for them, as we only kept our nicest books in the drawing-room, when this rat-a-tat knock came to the door. ”

“ The retiring rooms and lunch rooms for assistants, the conversation or class rooms for special work, the rooms for rough work—as mending or binding and the manual part of the preparation of books for the shelf—the periodical room, and the newspaper room can all be placed at a distance from the library's real center, the delivery counter ”

“ How often will you find in the room of the scholar, the studio of the artist, the picture or bust of some old master in art or letters, as if the occupant were conscious of the incentive such presence offered to his own efforts—the guardian genius of the spot. ”

“ I have often heard voices in the drawing-room, which decidedly sounded as if an old gentleman and a girl were talking. Noises like furniture being moved were frequently heard at night, and strangers staying with us have often asked why the servants turned out the rooms underneath them at such an unusual hour. ”

“ There is a spacious reading room at the further extremity of the library, where the student may take his worm-eaten folio, and seating himself in an old carved chair, may easily transport himself in fancy, two centuries back ”

“ The reader should practice in the room where the entertainment is to be given, at least enough to be sure of its acoustic properties and so secure the right pitch of voice,--height and size of room, as well as shape and furnishings, making a great difference.
The reading must be given in front of the closed curtain, that the manager may be having the stage prepared for each succeeding tableau, that it may be presented promptly when desired. ”

“ In some libraries, and those usually of the larger size, an art room is provided, where students of works on painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts can go, and have about them whatever treasures the library may contain in that attractive field. ”

“ While a row of luxurious arm-chairs, in the main thoroughfare of the room, invited the reader of solid literature to reveal himself in the act of cultivating a virtue, a row of snug little curtained recesses, opening at intervals out of one of the walls, enabled the reader of light literature to conceal himself in the act of indulging a vice. ”

“ The literary history and the poetry of the drawing-room see in the life of man a salon, a decorated ball-room, the men and the furnishings polished alike, in which no dark corners escape illumination. ”

“ I always look at a room as a painting. It never occurs to me whether the articles in it are cheap or dear, so that only the general effect is warm, and social, and agreeable. And that is just what you have made these rooms. ”