A home library would be my lottery-win dream

I don’t mean a sprawling, wood-panelled affair more suited to Colonel Mustard with the lead pipe, although that would be lovely; just a small room would do, somewhere cosy with wrap-around shelves and space for a battered leather armchair. It would be place to retreat to, away from the stresses of the world, where I could wallow in books.

Sadly, in my house, there isn’t much room and, 19 years after moving in, many of our books are still lying in boxes in the loft.

We have far too many books, the majority belonging to my husband. When we first met and he took me back to his flat - for nothing more adventurous than egg mayonnaise sandwiches and a cup of tea - where I was elated to see so many books. I was also, if I’m honest, a little intimidated - many were by forgeign authors I had only ever heard of on University Challenge: Emile Zola, Jean- Paul Sartre and Franz Kafka to name a few.

I’d been used to boyfriends whose reading matter was limited to Haynes manuals and it was refreshing to meet someone who, like my dad, owned hundreds of books, kept on bespoke shelves and in old wooden bookcases. But, when my books met his books, we were faced with a problem: where to house them.

Our previous home had decent wall space for shelves, but even then not enough. This house is far smaller and offers little space for our lifetime’s collection.

I am not the only person craving a library. Libraries, it seems, are the new must-haves - interior designers report a boom in demand. But they are not my kind of library - many people colour-code their books or even place their spines inwards to present a minimalist look of white pages.

It’s sad to think that many libraries are nothing more than a ‘feature’, to be admired by guests, with the home owners having paid someone to choose and place the books, which will never be picked up let alone read.

Having said that, whether they read them or not, at least they are buying books. Sales are soaring and, according to the Booksellers Association, the number of independent bookshops is at a ten-year high.

The desire for ‘libraries’ was, I suspect, sparked by lockdown, when bookshelves were the ‘go-to’ backdrop for Zoom calls.

While it falls short of having room for a library, I am making the best of our limited wall space. My husband has made bookshelves in the living room, filled a whole wall of a bedroom with shelves and we have four free-standing bookshelves. It’s all a bit haphazard and falls short of the space needed to house our entire collection - we need the Bodleian for that - but it means that books feature in almost every room in the house.

For those of us who don’t have, and are never likely to have, a library, there are plenty of imaginative suggestions online as to how to display books including on windowsills, in unused fireplaces and even on the floor bordered by bookends with a shelf on top.

Wherever you put them, just having your books on display is comforting. Books are like old friends and make a house a home.

Yesterday was National Book Day which got me thinking - I need to rack my brain and find somewhere for our poor abandoned books languishing in the loft. The answer has been staring me in the face: a loft conversion - if we can ever afford it, my library can go up there.