Sotheby’s International Realty listings with libraries worth studying.
Ellison Bay, Wisconsin: Sitting on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, this home has a grand parlor, 14-seat theater, indoor pool and two-story wood paneled library. Only $8,750,000.
Los Altos Hills, California: The Morgan Estate was built in 1914. One of the finest examples of Tudor and Jacobean revival architecture in the United States, the manse has a library with mahogany shelves, fabric-lined walls and a hidden wall-mounted television. It will cost you a bit more — $27,000,000.
Homes with libraries
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The sun never rises…
… in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in Yale University, home to 500,000 volumes of rare books and several million manuscripts, Dan Lewis tells us in Now I Know.
One of the biggest problems with caring for old books is that they will, over time, disintegrate. The library’s job? Slow down that process as much as possible. The solutions: gas, freezers, and no sunlight.
The windows are made of stone — translucent marble which glows when illuminated but protects the interior from direct sunlight. (
During the day, the Beinecke Library’s walls turn amber if you’re inside.
A glass tower filled with the rarest books is air-tight to slow disintegration. Bookworms once infested the column and the typical solution — an airborne insecticide — wasn’t viable in an enclosed, air-tight space. The librarians decided to freeze (and then thaw) all the books.
Protecting the books
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A ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world
Mystery humans spiced up ancients’ rampant sex lives, Genome analysis suggests interbreeding between modern humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans and a mysterious archaic population, Ewen Callaway writes in Nature.
“What it begins to suggest is that we’re looking at a ‘Lord of the Rings’-type world — that there were many hominid populations,” said Mark Thomas, an evolutionary geneticist.
The ancient genomes, one from a Neanderthal and one from a different archaic human group, the Denisovans, were presented at a meeting at the Royal Society in London. They suggest that interbreeding went on between the members of several ancient human-like groups living in Europe and Asia more than 30,000 years ago, including an as-yet unknown human ancestor from Asia.
An excavation in Denisova cave in Siberia, Russia, where remains of Denisovan hominins were first discovered. RIA NOVOSTI/SPL
Our sexy ancestors
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Alma Alexander
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