ORANGE COUNTY STYLE : Rooms that speak volumes : Four home libraries that represent a divergence of literary tastes and interests--including the poems of Longfellow

For some Orange County residents, a house isn’t a home without a room devoted to shelf after shelf of books, lovingly collected. Lin Currie, owner of Orange County’s oldest used-book store, Apollo Book Shop in Costa Mesa, says the area is home to hundreds of book collectors.

Currie, himself a collector of books on Western humor, says that, although his shop is neatly organized by subject, his home library is “a shambles.”

Other Orange County collectors are meticulous in the organization and display of their books. Many have created impressive home libraries, some with collections of distinction.

The four home libraries on these pages represent a divergence of literary tastes and interests--from the poems of Longfellow to the arts of calligraphy and printing. Yet all of the collectors share a common trait: a lifelong love of books.

When Baldwin Reinhold, a Swiss immigrant, died in Laguna Hills in 1976 at age 93, he left his son Ben an unusual legacy: a library of 20th-Century history.

That legacy--about 13,000 books that deal with social, political and economic issues--is kept in Ben and Darlene Reinhold’s sprawling redwood house overlooking the ocean in the Shores area of Laguna Niguel.

“My father was tremendously interested in the great changes that were occurring in the world, particularly in Europe and the United States,” says Ben Reinhold, 62, chairman and chief executive officer of Varco International, the Orange-based oil-drilling tools and equipment manufacturer founded by his father in 1908 in Los Angeles.

“My father complemented the library with many of the best novels of the day,” says Reinhold. “All the books of (John) Steinbeck, Somerset Maugham--every great (20th-Century) novel from Europe and the United States--can be found in this room.”

The library is spectacular to view: Dark teak bookcases line the 14-foot-high walls. Hard-to-reach volumes are made accessible by a ladder that glides on a track that encircles the room; the room’s focal point is a polished black-granite fireplace with a life-size portrait of Reinhold’s German-born mother, Charlotte, above the mantle. A sliding-glass door opens onto an atrium filled with stacks of magazines and newspapers.

“I spend probably two hours here every evening,” says Reinhold. “It’s quiet and I think the atmosphere is very conducive to reading and studying.”

Reinhold says he is gradually updating the collection. He has already added all the books bout the Watergate scandal.

Besides augmenting the collection with history books, Reinhold is continuing a tradition begun by his father. Baldwin Reinhold would save newspaper articles about the major political and social issues of the day--such as the immigration of Dust Bowl farmers to California in the ‘30s and the McCarthy hearings in the ‘50s. Later, when books on those subjects were published, he would insert the appropriate clippings into the books.

Ben Reinhold is currently cutting out and saving articles about the Iran-contra affair, which he, in turn, will tuck into books about the scandal as they are published. “The clippings,” says Reinhold, “make the history books very interesting.”

When Dean and Gerda Koontz married in 1966, they shared a common dream: to build a home library. But with Dean just beginning a teaching job in a federal poverty program and Gerda working as a bank teller, money was scarce. Like many newlyweds, they built their first “library” with bricks and boards.

Now that Dean Koontz, 42, is a best-selling author--50 novels published in 20 years with sales of more than 40 million copies--the couple has built the library of their dreams.

Eight years ago, when they moved into a spacious, two-story house in a private equestrian community in the hills east of Orange, they hired a cabinetmaker to design, build and install dark oak bookcases in a converted den.

Floor-to-ceiling bookcases line all four walls of the small room, which is furnished with only a wingback chair, a small reading lamp and an oriental rug.

“My collection focuses mainly on mystery, suspense, science fiction, fantasy and horror,” says Koontz, whose 51st novel, “Lightning,” a “cross-genre” thriller, will be published later this year.

Koontz’s two favorite books are a 1930 first edition of “The Maltese Falcon,” and a 1983 Arion Press limited illustrated edition of the Dashiell Hammett mystery classic.

This library holds 4,000 of the 20,000 or more volumes in the Koontz collection. Additional bookcases in the living room display leather bound classics and shelveds in five other rooms hold yet more books. Seventy boxes of individually wrapped books are in the garage, and another 6,000 books are in storage.

Both the Koontzes work at home (Gerda serves as her husband’s assistant and coordinator of foreign rights sales), and they say they have begun to feel claustrophobic sharing space with all these volumes and are thinking of moving to a larger house.

Dean Koontz says his dream for their next house in an enormous library with floor-to-ceiling shelves. “And maybe stacks in the middle,” he adds, laughing, “to make it a genuine library.”

“This is primarily a working library,” says Ward Ritchie, unlocking the door to the studio in his Emerald Bay home in Laguna Beach.

Perhaps the best-known and most prolific of the art printers who flourished in this region in the ‘30s, Ritchie is regarded as the outstanding practitioner of fine printing in Southern California today.

Inside the cozy, dimly lit room are about 3,500 volumes, mostly books about books: calligraphy, printing, libraries and book collecting. They range in age from relatively new to 500 years old.

His current collection represents only a portion of the books Ritchie, 82, has accumulated since he began book-buying in earnest as a college boy working for a Pasadena bookseller in the ‘20s. “I spent most of my wages buying books, and it’s continued ever since,” he says.

When he and his late wife, Marka, sold their house in Pasadena in 1974 and moved into this smaller home, Ritchie had to reduce his collection by 8,000 volumes. There simply wasn’t enough room, he says. He donated many to the Huntington Library and to libraries at Occidental College, UCLA and Scripps College.

It was, he admits, difficult to part with them.

Ritchie’s library is a somewhat cluttered 18-by-30-foot room, eclectically furnished with antiques.

The room’s focal point is an 1835 English Albion hand press, which Ritchie bought after retiring from the publishing business in 1974. On it, he has produced 26 small, experimental books of his recollections of poet Robinson Jeffers, Gertrude Stein and other authors he knew during his heyday. His current project is a “book about the books,” a personal history of each book he has published.

Although Ritchie has run out of room, he hasn’t stopped buying books.

He still adds to his collection of tomes by the U.S. expatriates who lived in Paris during the ‘20s and ‘30s. Ritchie is familiar with the milieu: In the early 1930s--while serving an apprenticeship with Francois-Louis Schmied, the most innovative designer and printer of the time--Ritchie lived in a Paris garret vacated by author Henry Miller.

Ritchie treasures the books he bought during that period at the legendary Paris bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, which was owned by his friend Sylvia Beach.

Gene Freeman of Santa Ana bought his first book of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetry, “Tales of A Wayside Inn,” in 1958, while majoring in experimental psychology at Cal State Long Beach. Today, Freeman’s Longfellow collection, displayed in floor-to-ceiling bookcases on a balcony overlooking his living room, is considered one of the nation’s best.

“When I was in school you had to read Longfellow,” says Freeman, 56, a program manager at Rockwell International in Anaheim.

Of the 19th-Century New England poet, who penned the immortal “Hiawatha” and “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” Freeman says:

“He just writes straightforward, easily understood poetry. He tends to be a bit maudlin, but he’s easily read and he tells a good story. And he wrote a lot .”

Freeman has about 500 volumes of Longfellow, many of them American and British first editions. One of his favorites is an 1842 book of Longfellow’s poems on slavery that the poet signed and gave to one of his sisters. Freeman also collects dictionaries dating back as far as 1574, and other 19th-Century books, including the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and pre-Darwinian natural-history books.

“Everybody’s impressed with the books,” says Freeman’s wife, Barbara. “They say, ‘Oh, your husband must be a lawyer.”’ She, however, does not share her husband’s love of old books. “I just don’t like it,” she says with a laugh, “when the books move you out of every room in the house.”

Freeman’s Longfellow collection includes an array of vintage Longfellow souvenirs and artifacts such as sheet music, jugs and plats. Among the memorabilia displayed on the living room wall are an autographed portrait of the poet and a framed shingle and old nails from Longfellow’s home in Cambridge, Mass.

“I collect,” Freeman explains, “because I like the book as an artifact. The books as an artifact, I think, is . . . a cut above stamps.”