A Library the Internet Can't Get Enough Of

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

Tweet text:

Kristin Wilson
@kristin__wilson
What I would give to have wandered about in this home.
“Dr. Macksey’s book collection clocked in at 51,000 titles…several first editions by 20th-century poets and novelists sat on a shelf in the laundry room.”
Richard Macksey’s home library. The image seems to go viral on Twitter annually.
nytimes.com
A Library the Internet Can’t Get Enough Of
Why does this image keep resurfacing on social media?
10:33 AM · Jan 15, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/style/richard-macksey-library.html

https://archive.fo/tSrKC


On the first Tuesday of the year, the author and political activist Don Winslow tweeted a photograph of an avid reader’s dream library. Bathed in the buttery glow of three table lamps, almost every surface of the room is covered with books. There are books on the tables, books stacked on mahogany ladders, and books atop still more books lining the shelves of the room. “I hope you see the beauty in this that I do,” Mr. Winslow wrote in the tweet, which has been acknowledged with 32,800 hearts.

If you spend enough time in the literary corners of Twitter, this image may look familiar. It rises again just about annually, and the library has been attributed over the years to authors including Umberto Eco and buildings in Italy and Prague. As with other images featuring beautiful bookshelves, people go absolutely bananas for it. Mr. Winslow’s post received 1,700 comments, including one from a professor at Pace University who has been using the photo as his Zoom background.

“It’s clearly the home of a person who loves and collects books,” Mr. Winslow said in an email through his agent, Shane Salerno. “For me, I think that photo is as stunning as a sunset. I could spend days and days locked in that library examining each book.” He noted that there’s something comforting about the image, since “it’s a room you could happily get lost in.”

Mr. Winslow had no idea the origin of the photo. He himself had found it on Twitter, but didn’t remember the name or location of the library. (Though he believed it to be the personal library of a prominent author from another country.)

*snip*

[JanMichael]

1. Nice story. The image also shows the impermanence of the world

The books were there he was there people still enjoy it but it's not there as the photo showed it was. It is now everywhere but nowhere.

Kind of cool. He sounds like he was a pretty interesting professor.