It was a terrible thing to live with, like finding oneself the unwitting warden of a prison holding all of your best friends.

Most of Donald S. Connery’s prized books — more than six decades worth of collecting, from New York to Moscow and from to Japan to Connecticut — were languishing in boxes, incarcerated in solitary cardboard confinement. Alas, it is the predicament of book lovers all over:

What to do with them all? Connery’s solution was artful and extravagant, befitting a former foreign correspondent who since 1968 has lived at a mountaintop farm in Kent, Conn. Connery and his wife, Leslie, converted the silo attached to their 200-year-old barn into a most unusual home library.

"We had fence posts and rails stored in there, and the roof was leaking like crazy. I kept thinking, What a waste. What is it good for?" Connery recalled during a visit to his silo library. In the late 1980s, after 20 or so years of pondering, he hired a carpenter to rework the old round silo into a three-story cylindrical library. At last count, he and his wife had about 10,000 volumes in the silo, with a few thousand more in the house.

"I just felt they meant so much to me," said Connery, whose specialty these days is writing about criminal justice and wrongful convictions, including the infamous Peter Reilly case. "You are with your friends, which is the way I think of books."

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In an age of palatial "media" rooms with nary a book in sight, it would be a stretch to say home libraries are making any kind of roaring comeback. But to the devotee, the home library is a vibrant, sacred space that can be as small as the corner of a room or as profligate as a mountaintop silo.

It’s also a retro makeover that can transform a drab, lifeless space into a room of intrigue that reminds visitors that relaxing at home isn’t necessarily always about the latest gargantuan flat-screen television.

"I can’t imagine living without books. If I go out to dinner at someone else’s home, and they don’t have books visible, I wonder if I want them as friends," said Barbara Farnsworth, an antiquarian bookseller in West Cornwall, Conn.

To those who are building their collections — or, like Bill Goring of Torrington, Conn., are still cramming ever-more volumes into an already over-stuffed room — it isn’t a question of why. Rather, it is how could one live without a room devoted to books?

Goring, who is also a used and antiquarian bookseller, has his retail shop, Nutmeg Books, behind his house. His personal library is a simple affair: just a room in his rambling house packed to the rafters with books.

"When we bought this house, we designated this room the library," he said, leading a tour past shelves containing everything from Karl Marx to a volume titled "Glimpses of the Supernatural."

Goring hired a friend to build his shelves. For most of us, this, or The Home Depot do-it-yourself option, is still the most affordable strategy when thinking about a library. Still, a few inquires to contractors and woodworkers suggest that people are building libraries — and nice ones.

"The trick is, you have to look at the house," said Rene Roy, a contractor and finish carpenter who works throughout the Hartford, Conn., area. A good library or bookcase must build on the overall feel of a room, not clash with it, he said.

For one customer, "I built a cherry bookcase, and it was $8,000. It was 12 feet wide by 9 feet tall. It was a work of art." A quality 3-by-8-foot built-in bookcase with a limited amount of ornamental trim and moulding work will run about $1,500, Roy said.

For Robert Haxhi and his wife, Jessica, two public school teachers of Middlebury, Conn., with a young daughter and an 8-year-old colonial-style house, cost was an important consideration. They knew they wanted a library, but they also knew they couldn’t afford to retrofit an entire room.

In creating their library, the Haxhis chose to have their new shelves built out of cherry, a high-quality wood, and finished with a dark mahogany stain. They also knew they wanted built-in bookcases, even if it meant they couldn’t build as many to start with.

Shopping around, one carpenter quoted them $7,000, but they were eventually able to find a woodshop that would build and install five 3-by-8-foot sections for $3,200.

"For me, it was like getting a thorn pulled out of my foot," Robert Haxhi recalled, referring to the feeling of putting his book collection in one place, organized by subject matter and author. Haxhi, a teacher and chairman of the history department at Wilby High School in Waterbury, Conn., has a growing collection of Civil War books.

"I reference them constantly. The fact that they are organized, I can pop in here on a moment’s notice if I am preparing a lesson plan," he said. "It’s not just a beautiful piece of furniture, it’s a way to organize our life." Their books were in storage and crammed in closets before the bookshelves went in.

"I enjoy these bookcases more than I enjoy my car. This is like sitting in a Jacuzzi," he said. "Sometimes at night before bed, I will just take a peek in here before I go up."

Connery, whose exotic library emphasizes maximum shelf space, simple lighting and rustic wood, said he can’t recall what they spent on the silo renovation. It’s an understandable excuse, perhaps, since climbing through three floors of books via the library’s central spiral staircase is overwhelming enough.

Using designs prepared by their son, the Connerys hired a carpenter who spent nearly a year building the floors and the shelves, which extend in a circular fashion around each level of the silo. On the top floor, he had the roof raised and windows installed all around, which offers the visitor a feeling of being on top of the world, surrounded by books.

"It’s as quiet a hideaway as you’d find anywhere," Connery said. "You can pull this futon couch thing out. When the house is full of kids and grandchildren, Leslie and I come out here and sleep," he said. "You wake up in the morning, and you know you have no radio and television or telephone. It’s an antidote to the pressures of the world."