Fake library – Charles Dickens

Before he moved to his country home, Gads Hill Place, Charles Dickens (1812-1870) made a draft of a secret door that led to a secret chamber, which he chose to be his workroom.

The secret door was actually a fake library, whose shelves, as well as books, were fake.   While making this mask for the door, Dickens also devised a series of humorous book titles, which occupied the false shelves.

Here are some of those titles: Hansard's Guide to Refreshing Sleep, History of a Short Chancery Suit (in twenty-one volumes), Socrates on Wedlock, King Henry the Eighth's Evidences of Christianity, the series The Wisdom of Our Ancestors: I Ignorance, II Superstition, III The Block, IV The Stake, V The Rack, VI Dirt, and VII Disease.

Among those humorous titles there was also a very narrow dummy volume entitled The Virtues of Our Ancestors.