Secretary Albright's Sugar Shakers

And Other Significant Parts of Great Women's Houses

Gallery
Treasures of Great Women
"Dr. Johnson's Doorknob" by Liz Workman (Rizzoli, $25) is a quirky pictorial anthology of domestic details from the house museums of famous men. Just men? Excuse us for feeling honor-bound to respond and visit the homes of five celebrated women to illuminate the objects of their everyday lives.

"Dr. Johnson's Doorknob: And Other Significant Parts of Great Men's Houses" is an eccentric little book with a clever conceit.

British writer-photographer Liz Workman offers intimate glimpses of furnishings and architectural details -- beds, banisters, teacups, desks and, yes, doorknobs -- in the house museums of 18 famous dead men.

Sigmund Freud's ashtray in the London home-office he occupied during the last year of his life reminds us that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. George Washington's mantelpiece in the small dining room at Mount Vernon is (and was) painted a truly startling green. And if Ralph Lauren is as smart as we think, he'll want to knock off a version of Thomas Carlyle's elegant writing stand, which appears to grow, vine-like, around the 19th-century Scottish essayist's battered leather chair.

For reasons never explained, Workman provides virtually no text to accompany the photos, not even a mention of the Great Ones' contributions to civilization. You either know Thomas Cole was a famed Hudson River painter and Sir John Soane was an influential English architect and collector, or you Google them.

Furthermore, the author does not deign to include a single woman among her subjects. Instead, Workman leaves it to uber-feminist Germaine Greer to concede in the foreword that "most of the houses in this book were inhabited and run by women, whose influence has been obliterated by history." Greer goes on to explain that even in the "modest dwellings" that would become house museums of accomplished members of her own sex, "there is nothing designated Jane Austen's chair or Charlotte Bronte's desk because these women did not have property or a space of their own."

So with a nod to Workman, we now focus on things that are, or were, "significant parts" of the domestic lives of five great women -- three of them, happily, very much still with us.