The best hour of the day, for a lot of us, is the one nobody planned. The house has gone quiet, the dishes are done, and the book you have been thinking about since lunch is waiting on the arm of the chair. You do not need much to make that hour good. You need a lamp, a chair, one candle, and your phone in another room. That is the whole list.
The lamp is for the page and the candle is for the room
Nobody can read by candlelight for long. The page needs a proper lamp, close by and pointed at the book rather than at your face. The candle is for everything else. It gives you a second, lower light to look up into between chapters, and it puts a scent in the room, which is most of the reason anyone lights one. Set it a little way off, on a flat surface where you can see it, and never on the arm of the chair or anywhere a blanket or a sleeve could reach it.
One candle is enough. A reading corner is a small space, and you are going to be sitting in it for a couple of hours with your nose a few feet from the jar. One candle fills a small room comfortably. Two start to argue with each other, and three will chase you out.
The phone
The phone goes in another room, or at the very least face down on the far side of this one. The whole point of the hour is that nobody needs you, and the phone exists to tell you that somebody does. If you read on it, turn the notifications off before you sit down, because you will not get up to do it later.
Which candle for which hour
The six candles are written in the order of one night, so the hour tells you which one to light. Midnight Study is for the desk and the last chapter, when it is properly late and nobody is awake to call you to bed. The Lamplit Shelf is for a little earlier, when you are still standing at the shelf deciding what to read. The Reading Chair is for the long sit, the evening you know you are not getting up for a while. Those three are the After Dark shelf, in amber glass with a gold lid and a black label, and each one burns for up to fifty hours.
The other three are the Open Hours shelf, in clear glass with a white lid and a parchment label, and they burn for about fifty to sixty hours. The Fireside Chapter is for the end of the evening, when the fire is more glow than flame and you have promised yourself one more chapter. The Morning Reading Room is for the early riser who gets a chapter in before the day starts. The Herbarium is the odd one out, because it is not about an hour at all. It is for the gray day in January when you would like August back. If you would rather choose by what is in the wax, every jar has a line that begins with the word Pours, and it says in plain words what was poured.
A good evening's read is two or three hours, which is about as long as a candle should burn in one go anyway. Put it out after four hours at the most and let it cool before you light it again. One jar will see you through a good few weeks of nights. And if you are the kind of reader who wakes at three with the book on your chest and the lamp still on, put the candle out before the chapter that might do it.
