And what has it meant for the bath library, may we ask

      

 It was bad enough,

 when every Tom, Dick

 and Harry could wan-

 der up to the front,

 with a portable cam-

 era. At least that

 came in handy for
 tracking Mr Waldheim

 through the Balkans.
 But now, cameras are

 entering the bath -

 and not just as cam-

 eras, anymore, but

 as personal devices

 of the broadest ap-

 plication. Something

 serious is at stake,

 or it isn't Friday.

Now, library designers tell me, cameras are also our book repositories. This would be fine, but for the camera's innate zeal to commemorate its user's every moment. It used to take a natural photographer 40 or 50 years to get through War and Peace. Now, is it even thinkable? Moreover, what would it matter, that Mr Baldwin had designed the snuggest library for your bath, if you're focusing on connectivity?

None too soon, designers are reviving the notion of borders, having first done so much to dissolve them. By using fixtures which are ever less com-modious, even less condu-cive to ease, to say nothing of that shrinkage in their compartments which has banished entire genres of bathing, the self excites less com-petition with the book.