I've fallen into a new rabbit hole lately: hunting down old design books that are no longer in print.

Bought a few from eBay recently. Mark Hampton on Decorating and Ilse Crawford's Home Is Where the Heart Is? Both secondhand, and both out of production as far as I can tell.

Part of the reason I go looking goes back to when I was a kid.

When I was 11 or 12, I started pulling books off the shelves at home and reading them. Two of them were The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. I'd even take them to school and read them at recess.

Odd reading for a 12-year-old, I know. It probably explains a lot about how my brain works now.

What strikes me about those business classics is that they never go away. Carnegie's book first came out in 1936, and you can still pick up a fresh copy nearly 90 years later.

Design books rarely get that treatment. Plenty of great ones get a single print run and then quietly disappear.

So if I want the classics, I have to go hunting.

Books Do Furnish a Room

While searching, I kept running into the same idea: books are one of the things that turn a house into a home.

There are whole books on it, like Bibliostyle: How We Live at Home with Books by Nina Freudenberger and Books Do Furnish a Room by Leslie Geddes-Brown.

I agree with them completely.

A bookshelf is a record of someone's life. It shows what they've been curious about over the years, and which subjects they could talk about for hours if you asked.

Psychologist Sam Gosling has studied this. In his research, strangers judged people's personalities purely from their bedrooms and offices, and they did surprisingly well. A diverse collection of books was one giveaway.

Why Books Make a Place Feel Like Yours

Psychologists have a name for the bond we form with a place: place attachment.

It builds over time, through memories, routines, and the things we choose to live with.

Back in 1977, researchers Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton interviewed 82 Chicago families about the objects in their homes that mattered most to them. Books came up again and again, alongside photographs and furniture.

That makes sense to me. A shelf of books you've read holds years of your own life. Each one also holds years of someone else's work, sometimes a whole career, and costs you $30 to $50.

That's a ridiculous deal when you think about it.

Music streams now. Books live on a Kindle. I keep one by my bed, so I'm not telling you to throw yours out. But a digital library can't sit on a wall and tell a guest who you are.

How to Live With More Books

You don't need a library to do this.

A built-in bookcase on either side of a fireplace works. So does a single run of shelving over a doorway, or a short stack on a side table with a lamp on top. The spines bring colour, and the cloth and paper add texture you can't get from much else.

One warning: you can now buy books by the metre, chosen purely for the colour of their spines. Please don't. The books that make a room feel like home are the ones you've read, or fully intend to.

My Own Shelf, If You're Curious

A lot of you have told me you enjoy it when I reference books in my videos, so I keep a list on Amazon of design books from my collection.

It isn't everything, since plenty of what I own (including those two eBay finds) isn't sold there. But if you're after a starting point, here's the list.

Cheers,
Reynard