Nonfiction · 1881
The Library
A practical and historical essay on making a library: how a book-room should be arranged and lit, how books are best kept, what is worth buying and what only looks as if it is, how early printed books and illustrated books came to be valued, and what bindings are for. Lang moves between the advice and the history — the great collectors, the famous rarities, the title-pages and devices reproduced through the volume — and is candid throughout about the difference between a working library and a collector's one.
Andrew Lang published The Library in 1881 in Macmillan's "Art at Home" series, which set out to tell middle-class householders how to furnish and live with taste. It is his first book on the subject he returned to for the rest of his life.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text, with Lang's prefatory note.
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1844–1912 · Victorian
Andrew Lang (1844–1912) was born in Selkirk and educated at St Andrews, Glasgow and Oxford, where he held a fellowship at Merton College before turning to literary journalism in London. A folklorist, classicist, historian, poet and immensely prolific reviewer, he is best remembered as the general editor of the twelve "colour" fairy books (1889–1910), for which his wife, Leonora Blanche Lang, and other collaborators carried out much of the actual translation under his direction. He also wrote fairy tales of his own, among them Prince Prigio, and a History of Scotland.
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