Was this boeken kamer primarily intended as a storage room for books or could have been also a place to read? The available evidence seems to point towards the former scenario. The nearby rooms, provided with numerous chairs and tables, offered plenty of spaces to read. A desk and a chair would have certainly been part of the furniture of the comptoir (home office). This rather small and well insulated room, on the other hand, would have offered the perfect place to store books in a safe (no fireplace nearby) and accessible way in this house. Its position close to the groote kamer, where family portraits and the collection of coins and medals were on display, would have created a visually powerful space of self-representation for the household.
As shown in this tour, the 3D reconstruction of the library room and its content results from a multi-source approach which combines information gathered from archival documents and secondary sources with the house’s building history and comparative material. The objects-oriented articles in this tour discussed each item individually to allow readers to have a peak ‘behind the scenes’ of a 3D reconstruction project. The library’s 3D reconstruction offers the possibility to investigate whether this room could have contained all the books in Pieter’s book auction catalogue. For a discussion on this estimate, see Piccoli, Pieter de Graeff.
Further reading:
C. Piccoli, Pieter de Graeff (1638-1707) and his treffelyke bibliotheek (Brill, 2025).