The Smoking Room and Library

The Smoking Room and Library at Alexander House is the Lounge and Reading Room where gentlemen can retire after dinner for the ritual of a fine cigar, pipe, or a scotch and bourbon. This room has red oak coffered ceilings, and all the walls are encased in red oak and leaded glass bookshelves. The shelves are filled with two thousand eight hundred leather-bound books dating from 1812 to the present, and several are first editions. The walls of this room have oil paintings from 1880-1900, with three racks of German Roebuck antlers mounted on carved Black Forest Shields. In the center of the room sits a Tiger oak library table and two leather wing-backed chairs; in between them sits a 1900s Humidor table whose top holds a carved meerschaum pipe, ivory cigar holder, silver matchbox, and cigar clip as well as other smoking accouterments. 

On the North wall, on top of the bookshelves, sit two white metal statues by Phillipe Poitevin (French sculptor 1831-1907) of Don Juan and Don Ceasar. In the center is an iron sculpture of the young Greek Titan Prometheus mounting his horse. Also on that wall are colored lithographs, one of which is of Prometheus being chained to a mountain by Zeus to be tortured by a golden eagle until Hercules breaks his bond. The other of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac the Lithograph is titled the “Binding of Isaac.” The old Woodstock typewriter, Victorian Ansonian Mantle clock, and travel souvenir are on the east shelf top. On the south are the old Edison wax recordings and two Victorian stereopticons. This room is decisively appointed in a masculine genre, where men can engage in confabulation without causing a stir in other areas of the cottage.