Why are books important to you?

I love books.

The love affair is not a new one. I started collecting books close to the time I began reading chapter books and I feel very fortunate that my passion for print has lead to career.

Since a book collection can function as a map, a record or timeline of the interests and creative development of an individual, the book collections of artists, architects, and public figures have always interested me. I believe that the books whose ideas and images influence those who create works that impact and inspire others have special significance.


Philip Johnson’s library collection is of particular interest because after the Glass House was completed in 1949 he lived and continued to build on the site for another 55 years. I remember the first time I saw the Monuments of Maya on Johnson’s shelf it made me smile and thought instantly of the underground painting gallery that resembles an ancient burial ground a few hundred yards away. His volumes on the eclectic visions of others such as, The Architecture of Fantasy and Fantastic Architecture fit as perfectly in this context as the early volumes on modern houses and those on the Bauhaus.

The diverse and important collection that remains in the Library/Study is not only a record of Johnson’s superb personal taste it is an inventory of the ideas and images that guided and influenced him as he continued to build on the Glass House site and throughout the world.

In celebration of the launch of The Library of Philip Johnson: Selection from the Glass House, I have asked some of the most creative people I know,

Why books are important to you?

I welcome you to join in the discussion.

Sunday, October 23 at 8:04pm

Books just excite me. They inspire me. They get your mind thinking creatively and there’s something about a book, holding it in your hand, turning the pages, you can see it, from close up, from far away. Books are like art, and I love when you walk into some place, or even my place, and there are books stacked up, there’s just something about it. Bruce Weber is a great collector of books, and when you go to his place and see all of these books you just can’t wait to sit down in a great chair, or something comfortable and go through them.

They really excite one creatively. It gives you new ideas, and can re-ignite ideas that you may have had. There’s something so emotional about it. Then you put the book down, you look at it, you love the way it looks. If it’s a good design book, what the cover is, the smell of the paper and the feel of it, and it’s a great feeling, there’s nothing like it. After turning those pages you can’t wait for the next one. Books are a very emotional thing for me, very exciting.

Sunday, October 23 at 8:07pm

I think that books are a tremendous resource to have, they’re an inspiration. They hold things that I don’t think are online right now. I’m sort of from a school of people who go to books to see inspiration, and I find a lot of the time what I see online is regurgitated from books anyway, so if you can get it from the original source, then why not?

Sunday, October 23 at 8:17pm

Books become the frame of reference that you always want to go back to, like an old friend, or an old soul that you keep looking at and going back to for reference and visuals. I love books and I love layout and graphic design, so it’s a merging of both of those things. I feel like books provide a little bit of a fantasy because you can look at a picture and kind of imagine yourself there, elaborate on what that surrounding might be, or what that space might be, or that room might be, so it’s something that we go back to all the time, we have a big library here.

Sunday, October 23 at 8:23pm

When I was little and thought that snowflakes were raindrops in costumes, there were three books at my grandmother’s house I was allowed to look at only on special occasions- that was before I could read… One was an ancient family bible, one a 17th century herb book with hand-colored prints and my favorite – a Grimm’s fairy tales pop-up book from the 1900′s, where the characters also moved when one pulled at little paper strips. I loved those books and they became even more fascinating when I was finally able to read them, although I remember to constantly force my grandmother to read me from the books.
Books are so essential to a person’s education and growth – they are full of wonders, information, inspiration and wisdom. And they fuel dreams and fantasy… I use books constantly, mainly for information and reference and I find it sad they are disappearing more and more… The same way that an architectural drawing rendered by hand can’t be replaced by one from the computer, a book can’t be replaced by a ‘machine’ – it needs to be ‘felt’ and used and read – not just ‘looked at’… I often think back to that herb book and how long it must have taken to print all the pages, to color the prints by hand and to then bin it in leather – that just can’t be downloaded…

Monday, October 24 at 12:04am

There are two types of books. The ones I find on my book shelve, dusty, with bookmarks on the center pages. And the books I can not set down. Written word combined with my own imagination sparks my emotions. These books make me cry, laugh, and inspire me. They take me into a world of unexpected exploration. Sometimes I feel like an idiot when I laugh out loud or a tear drops down on the page. Unfortunately, I think our society is reading less and less. People are turning to other forms of entertainment such as television. Books are important because they allow people to use their own imagination and creativity. If thousands of people read the same book they would all experience it differently. Each person would envision and interpret the book in their own way. It’s an experience that no one else can have. This is what makes books beautiful!

Monday, October 24 at 12:50am

When I was a teenager a small handful of books had an enormous impact on me. While I was in high school, the publication of Gabriel García Márquez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” and Martin Amis’s “London Fields” marked the beginning of my adult reading life. A little later, in college, I encountered Thomas S. Hines’s “Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture” around the same time that I found the first monograph published on the architecture firm Morphosis, both of which showed me the power of a collection of images and words to access the genius of another time or place. The Morphosis book also showed me that such productions were actually designed by someone, in this case Lorraine Wild, and Hines’s book inspired me to pursue a career in the service of such productions. And now I have run out of space to keep all of the books I have amassed in the years since!

Monday, October 24 at 11:03am

There is something very satisfying about being able to pick up a book and flip through the pages. Though books sit on shelves in compact form, they unfold to reveal a multitude of images and information, instantly transporting us to wherever we need to go. In our world of ever increasing technology, books never fail when the internet is down.

I can’t imagine my office or my home without my books. As a decorator, I rely on my library on a daily basis to illustrate what I am trying to convey to clients or artisans. I use specific books to look up details of things I’ve long ago stored faintly in memory and need to revisit. My books allow me to visit any museum or great house in the world without leaving my office. I can look up Iznik tile patterns or different Chinese trellis details if I need to. Likewise I can see different color combinations used by Gaugin in his Tahitian paintings or study the curve of the daybed David painted under Madame Recamier. No matter what I am trying to create, I rely on being able to see and study related things from the past, and with my books at hand, it’s only a matter of remembering which shelf holds which specific book.

Monday, October 24 at 2:12pm

Books are ideas. They transport – from a tropical island to a snow-covered mountain to a desert caravan. They are like good friends – always there, waiting for your return. They stimulate the reader to use his imagination whether it’s sailing an ocean or climbing the Eiffel Tower. They teach us to examine within, stimulate us to explore without and discover for ourselves all the wonderful mysteries that make us human.

Monday, October 24 at 5:32pm

I love that you can hold a book in your two hands and feel the weight, size, pages and see the all details that make it exquisite or appropriately disturbing, depending on the content. Books are objects and artifacts that don’t need anything to enhance them but a little light. No power cord, clicking and going around from window to window etc. Many of my books are beautiful in and of themselves, their design are what spoke to me. Sometimes I buy books for which I have no idea what the subject matter us, but the composition, materials, typography are the things that call my name. A while back, I was looking at books and saw only this particular book’s spine. I was hooked. Quickly looking inside, saw enough to validate my urge to make this purchase. That book as many others have never stopped delighting me and satisfying my passion to feast my eyes and sense of touch. I want books to be around forever.

Monday, October 24 at 6:11pm

We all belong to communities, even the creative process doesn’t occur in isolation, we learn from one another. Books in a sense expand my community across space and time. They provide me another way to communicate, to share ideas. In a way they record an ongoing, centuries long, conversation.

They can be magical. Through books I feel I’ve had conversations with people who lived hundreds, or even thousands of years ago, or that never even existed at all. I have also traveled through them, even to places like the moon that can’t support life. They bridge geography and time. They seem to be exempt from the laws of physics.

As objects they’re extraordinary, they’re so simple and perfectly designed. The size, weight, graphics everything about them determined by the human body. They can be very beautiful, some are works of art in their own right.

Tuesday, October 25 at 10:41am

As a child, my grandmother often lulled me to sleep with stories of my father’s childhood in Glasgow. The bleak life she described of towering smoke stacks and deep snow banks felt foreign when told in her California home, which overlooked an orange grove. She spoke of having to use cardboard to patch holes in shoes and the difficulty of raising four children after her husband’s death. While I was in middle school, she offered me employment typing out all of these stories. We negotiated a rate of 10 cents or so for each page that I transcribed. As I typed, I realized that this text would be the only testimony of her experience. With little more than two suitcases, she had followed my father to America after he emigrated from Scotland in the 70s. These stories were her identity. It was a history she recorded for her children and grandchildren. Several years ago, after a difficult struggle with Dementia, my grandmother passed away. I read her book during an occasional quiet moment. The lives of my father, his siblings and the woman I loved so dearly are instantly close.

My personal experience illustrates and emphasizes the power books hold in our society. Our ability, as a people, to record our history, our feelings and our beliefs is one of our most crucial tools to understanding who we are. The knowledge that we are able to pass generationally connects all the little lives that once were and gives us hope that we can create the world that our ancestors wished we would.

Thursday, October 27 at 6:39pm

Who would resist having information provided in a way that touched so many senses? You see the book, you hold it in your hands, you hear the pages as you open it, you smell the paper … A book can affect us in all of these ways, before we’ve begun to read even a single word. As we read, we form a personal relationship with the words, the information, the story, even the characters themselves. I think the response many of us have to a book closely parallels the response we have to something alive.

I also believe a book calls on three processes our brains apply to any given stimulus. The first is an auto-response that identifies congruity/incongruity, the second is a linear response to the need for logic and solving and the third is a creative response to what we do with information and ideas. A book calls on all three of these aspects of our minds in ways that connect deeply and uniquely. We savor the memory of a childhood story read by a grandparent. We recall, in detail, what happens to the characters in the first book we bought. We linger in a bookstore to consider authors and how their stories engage with our lives at certain moments.

Recently, I downloaded Moby Dick, in an attempt to read it on my iPhone. I’m enjoying the story for the classic it is, but I cannot say I’m enjoying the “book” since, as they say … there just is “no there there”. I have a feeling I’ll want the hardcover soon!

Friday, October 28 at 2:28pm

My love of books stems from childhood habit. From an early age, I used books as a kind of emotional portal and I would be lying if I didn’t tell you that I started reading to get out of my own brain as much as to get into someone else’s. When I was a kid in Ohio, books provided an escape hatch into time periods and hidden zones that I could never have imagined. I worry with so many outlets for escapism today that children might not be encouraged to pick up literature. But that would be a shame. What I’ve learned since my youth is that books aren’t just a way out but a way in. It’s not a passive activity. Books don’t serve as hold music for the mind. It’s honestly the only opportunity I can think of where you give yourself over to someone else’s creation but remain a fully active participant in the process—your imagination, your sense language, your emotions, and your intellect are fully engaged. In that way books are really the best mind experiment ever invented by human kind. There’s a reason why most high-school curriculums start with The Odyssey. In a way we are all recreating that epic journey, one part telling ourselves where we came from and another part staking out alone to find what we will become. 

Friday, November 4 at 12:24pm

Books are part of my everyday life, in fact we designed our house around our collection of books and it’s part of my growth every day, just looking at images, reading and studying. Because we’re architects we can never see enough.

Friday, November 4 at 3:14pm