The Way To A Girl's Heart

(image from mrsblandings)

"The room in which we were expected to sit was a stiffly-furnished, ugly apartment; but that in which we did sit was what Mr. Holbrooks called the counting-house, when he paid his labourers their weekly wages at a great desk near the door. The rest of the pretty sitting-room -- looking into the orchard, and all covered over with dancing tree-shadows -- was filled with books. They lay on the ground, they covered the walls, they strewed the table. He was evidently half ashamed and half proud of his extravagances in this respect. They were all kinds -- poetry and wild weird tales prevailing. He evidently chose his books in accordance with his own tastes, not because such and such were classical or established favorites."

"'Ah!' he said, 'we farmers ought not to have much time for reading; yet somehow one can't help it.'"

- Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

For another spectacular man's library, read The Cat Who Could Read Backwards by Lilian Jackson Braun. George Bonifield Mountclemens, the art critic, has a den worthy of, well, Mr. Mountclemens. Unearthly comfortable armchairs, culture-cluttered red walls and carpet, a Siamese cat and a kitchen where everything is well-made.