Archives for February 19, 2008

I had an idea that when we visited Biltmore House last Friday I’d just nip over to the library and have a good look around, and then we’d venture off to the gardens. But the tour though the house is more regulated than it used to be. As I remember it, you used to be able to sortie out a little bit on your own; but as it is now, you shuffle in a line on a prescribed one-way route through all four floors of the house, every so often pooling in an inlet to a particular room. No nipping, no darting, no backtracking. It’s a well-organized tour, and I salute the estate’s curators for succeeding where many other museums and historic sites have failed, by keeping me on track and in the main exhibit area and not off in some custodial closet or dead-end hallway or any of the other places I usually end up when left on my own to navigate– but it’s a little confining, especially for a repeat visitor.
This meant I revisited a lot of rooms I hadn’t intended to. Not the worst thing but I was glad I’d reminded myself that morning about Henry James’s comments about the house: Whenever I was going through a room I wasn’t particularly interested in, I’d imagine Henry there looking disagreeable. The banquet hall — an enormous, anachronistic room with great tapestries and flags on the walls and heads of deer and moose looking down — has a Skinner pipe organ that occasionally blasts away, and it was nice to think of the dyspepsia it must have given Henry at his dinner.
Another change: The estate’s library is long and rectangular, and I believe you used to be able to traverse the length of it. Now visitors are kept to one end, while the majority of the books are on display on the other end, too far away to be able to see any of the titles. I craned, but it was no good. It was like trying to read something from across a ballroom. “You should have brought binoculars,” Lowell said.
I was curious about the collection because it’s supposed to be an unusually good one. Vanderbilt was a great reader and an avid collector of rare books. So the library wasn’t assembled just for show, with one of those bought-in-lot collections that look impressive at first glance but are really dreary on closer inspection, all Julia, Country Nurse with a Heart and Prize-Winning Sheep of Hertfordshire, 1918, etc. But while you hear many numbers attached to Biltmore’s collection — the two most cited being: that there are more than 23,000 volumes in all (with about 10,000 displayed in the library), and that Vanderbilt started keeping a list when he was 12 of the books he’d read, and at the time of his death (at 52) the list was 3,159 books long — details about the books themselves are harder to come by. I remember odd bits about the books from previous visits but I meant to record a little more on this trip.
As I said, the library’s a long room with a high ceiling. Overhead is a ceiling painting by Pellegrini, The Chariot of Aurora, which came to the estate from a palace in Venice. A second level of books is reached by a spiral staircase. The shelving and paneling are walnut, and there’s a good amount of natural light from windows and French doors that lead out to the patio. The couches and chairs are elegant although maybe not as comfy and luxe as you might expect. Off to one side is a giant globe, which I think we can all agree no self-respecting library should be without.
The part of the collection that was within my sight was beautifully bound, with lots of reds, golds and browns. On one low shelf were the “magnum” oversized books, mostly about art, including:
• A five-volume set of Fables de Fontaine bound in a gorgeous leaf green
• Two volumes of Drawings of the Florentine Painters
• Carter’s Ancient Paintings and Sculptures in England
• Gainsborough Works
• Two volumes on The Royal Collection of Paintings, with volume one devoted to Buckingham and volume two to Windsor
• A multi-volume set stamped in gold leaf with titles like Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, Penrose’s Athenian Sculpture, and Ionian Antiquities by the Dilettanti, my favorite title of the day.
A representative smattering of titles from the shelves above:
• A two-volume set of Godwin’s Life of Chaucer
• Musical Instruments
• Auguste Rodin: L’Oeuvre et L’Homme by Judith Cladel
• Glimpses of Italian Court Life
• Holbein’s Court of Henry VIII
• A 45-volume set, bound in a bright cherry red, of L’Art
• Le Livre D’or de Victor Hugo shelved next door to a five-volume set on History of the Indian Tribes of the United States, right where you’d look for it
• And bound editions of Country Life magazine dating from 1896 to 1904 (this tickles me, as it both describes and completely fails to describe what Vanderbilt set up for himself at Biltmore)
The room’s attendant, who was lovely, told me many of the rarer books are kept on the third floor of the house, which is climate-controlled. The hallway where this part of the collection is displayed is darker, so it was harder to make out titles — also, my companion was looking a little rebellious — but I was taken by one shelf of books by Andrew Lang, including The Blue Fairy Book, Green Fairy Book, Yellow Fairy Book, Violet Fairy Book, The Animal Story Book, and The Book of Dreams and Ghosts.
The estate offers a number of specialty tours, and I wish they’d start a Library Tour, where you’d get to romp around the library beyond the cordon as well as handle some of the books, to look at the illustrations, read a little, and maybe huff at the bindings when the curator was discreetly turned away.

“California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”
Joan Didion, “Notes From a Native Daughter”