“Did Victorian pundits need less sleep than we do?” asked literary critic George Steiner in 1977.1 I thought of Steiner’s query while reading Charlotte Ribeyrol’s fascinating new book, William Burges’s Great Bookcase and the Victorian Colour Revolution. The bookcase’s designer, Victorian art-architect William Burges (1827–81), was not a pundit, but he was astonishingly well-read; his buildings, furniture, and decorative objects testify to his prodigious learning. One of the best examples of Burges’s wide erudition is the commodious bookcase he designed in 1859–62 for his office in London’s Buckingham Street. Intended to hold his books on art, the bookcase was later moved to the library in the house Burges designed for himself in Holland Park, Kensington. Purchased by Lord Kenneth Clark for Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum in 1933, the bookcase was not publicly displayed there until 2016. A comprehensive study of a bookcase designed by this bookish architect is a...

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