From old monastery libraries to recently built public libraries, grouped by region. Click a name to see its location on the map.
The 65-metre Long Room holds 200,000 of the library's oldest books on two levels of shelves, under a barrel-vaulted timber ceiling added in 1860. The 9th-century Book of Kells is kept here, which makes it one of the most visited sights in Ireland.
Photo: Diliff · CC BY-SA 4.0
Built as the Habsburg court library, the Prunksaal (State Hall) is about 80 metres long and 20 metres high. About 200,000 old books stand on walnut shelves under Daniel Gran's ceiling frescoes, and a statue of Charles VI stands beneath the central dome.
Photo: Azerifactory · CC BY-SA 4.0
Often called the largest monastery library in the world. The white-and-gold hall is 70 metres long, with seven ceiling frescoes by Bartolomeo Altomonte. Joseph Stammel's carvings of the Four Last Things (death, judgment, hell, heaven) stand guard in the hall.
Photo: Jorge Royan · CC BY-SA 3.0.jpg?width=500)
A university library founded by King John V of Portugal, with shelves painted in gold from Brazil and decorated with chinoiserie. At night, bats that live in the shelves eat the insects that gnaw the books, so the librarians still cover the tables with leather cloths every evening.
Photo: Martien Brand from Mariënberg, The Netherlands · CC BY 2.0
One of the oldest libraries in the world, with a history reaching back to the 8th century. Above the door of the rococo hall is a Greek inscription meaning 'pharmacy of the soul'. It holds around 2,000 medieval manuscripts, and the whole abbey precinct became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1983.
Photo: Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen · CC BY-SA 3.0
Famous for its oval, three-storey Rococo Hall. Goethe oversaw the library for 35 years. A fire in 2004 destroyed 50,000 books, and after three years of restoration it reopened in 2007.
Photo: Steffen Schmitz (more photos) · CC BY-SA 4.0
A cube-shaped building designed by the Korean architect Eun Young Yi. Inside, white terraced reading galleries open like a funnel through five floors, which made it one of the most photographed modern libraries. At night the glass blocks of the facade glow blue.
Photo: Pablodbds · CC0
The second-largest library in Britain. The 15th-century Duke Humfrey's Library and the vaulted Divinity School appeared as Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films. It is a legal deposit library that receives every book published in the UK.
Photo: Diliff · CC BY-SA 3.0
A neo-Gothic library founded by Enriqueta Rylands in memory of her husband. Its church-like vaulted reading room is the main attraction. It holds Papyrus P52, a fragment of the Gospel of John considered one of the oldest surviving pieces of the New Testament.
Photo: Mdbeckwith · CC BY 3.0
The library of the monastery-palace built by Philip II. On the 54-metre barrel vault, Pellegrino Tibaldi painted the seven liberal arts, including grammar, rhetoric and astronomy. The books are shelved with the fore-edge (the paper side) facing out, not the spine.
Photo: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0
Built for Finland's 100th anniversary of independence. The ground floor has a cinema and cafe, the second floor is a workshop where you can borrow 3D printers, sewing machines and recording studios, and the third floor is a 'book heaven' with only books under a wave-shaped white ceiling. It won the IFLA Public Library of the Year award in 2019.
Photo: Leonhard Lenz · CC0
Inside an orange cylindrical building, the walls of a round hall are lined 360 degrees with three tiers of shelves. It is a landmark of the transition to Nordic modernism.
Photo: Arild Vågen · CC BY-SA 4.0
A circular reading room opened in 1879, modelled on the British Museum Reading Room, and the first library in Britain lit by electricity. Behind it is the Hornby Library, added in 1906 by Thomas Shelmerdine and decorated in Edwardian style. The building is Grade II* listed.
Photo: Rodhullandemu · CC BY-SA 4.0
The oldest university library in Spain, founded in 1254 by Alfonso X. It is on the upper cloister gallery of the Escuelas Mayores building, with a Gothic doorway and an iron grille of 1526 guarding the entrance. The present great hall was remodelled in 1749 and is surrounded by lavish baroque wooden shelves on two levels.
Photo: Antoine Taveneaux · CC BY-SA 3.0
Built from 1447 to 1452 and opened in 1454, it is the first civic library in Europe, run by the town rather than by the church or a noble family. The lord Malatesta Novello founded it. It is the only early Renaissance library whose original building, furniture and books survive together. It was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in 2005.
Photo: Terragio67 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Norway's first and largest library, opened in 1785 when Carl Deichman gave 7,000 books and 150 manuscripts. It was open to all citizens from the start. In 2020 it moved into a new main building in the Bjørvika district beside the Oslo fjord. Registered users can use it from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., even when staff are not present.
Photo: Harald Groven · CC BY-SA 2.0
Ireland's first public library, founded by Archbishop Narcissus Marsh. To read a precious book, readers had to step into a wire 'cage' and be locked in; the cages are still there. The shelving is as it was 300 years ago.
Photo: Sitomon · CC BY-SA 2.0A Benedictine abbey on a rocky hill above the Danube. The library ceiling is covered with Paul Troger's frescoes and the collection is about 100,000 volumes. The narrator of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose is Adso of Melk, a novice from this abbey.
Photo: Leo Wehrli · CC BY-SA 4.0
The library of an Augustinian abbey holds about 150,000 volumes. Bartolomeo Altomonte painted the ceiling. The composer Anton Bruckner was the abbey's organist and is buried beneath the church.
Photo: Zairon · CC BY-SA 3.0.jpg?width=500)
An 88-metre rococo library inside a vast complex that combines a palace, a convent and a basilica. It holds about 36,000 books. As in Coimbra, bats here protect the books. The complex became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2019.
Photo: Pedro Ribeiro Simões from Lisboa, Portugal · CC BY 2.0
A baroque library hall in a former Jesuit college, with globes lined up between ceiling frescoes and gilded decoration. The same complex has an astronomical tower built in 1722, where temperature records have been kept without a break since 1775.
Photo: Skot · CC BY-SA 4.0
Two halls: the Theological Hall (1679), with white stucco decoration, and the Philosophical Hall (1797), with two-storey walnut shelves. Its ceiling painting by Franz Anton Maulbertsch is called The Intellectual Development of Mankind.
Photo: HutheMeow · CC BY-SA 4.0
The library hall of a former Benedictine abbey south of Ulm. White and pastel columns carry a two-storey gallery, and wooden figures representing learning and virtue line the front of the gallery. It is counted among the finest German rococo libraries.
Photo: Spatzameez · CC BY-SA 4.0
The library of a Cistercian nunnery near the Czech border. It is known for ten life-size wooden figures that support the gallery and personify vices such as ignorance and pride. They are the work of Karl Stilp.
Photo: Zairon · CC BY-SA 3.0
A work of Christopher Wren, who designed St Paul's Cathedral. Grinling Gibbons carved the wooden decorations at the end of each bookcase. It holds Newton's notebooks and the manuscripts of Winnie-the-Pooh.
Photo: Photos taken for William Winfield; uploaded by Kimberlyblaker · Public domain
The oldest free public library in the English-speaking world, still in its 15th-century building. In 1845 Marx and Engels read together at a window seat here, and the table is still there.
Photo: Michael D Beckwith · CC BY 3.0.jpeg?width=500)
Prime Minister William Gladstone wheeled about 30,000 of his own books here by wheelbarrow to found it. It is famous as a residential library: there are guest rooms in the building, so you can stay overnight and read.
Photo: Michael D Beckwith · CC0
One of the largest libraries in the world, with close to 200 million items. A six-storey glass tower, the King's Library, holds George III's collection at the heart of the building. In the Treasures gallery you can see Magna Carta and handwritten Beatles lyrics.
Photo: Derbrauni · CC BY 4.0
Its facade is a stack of gilded interlocking rings. Inside, circular floors step up around the atrium, and the old Victorian Shakespeare Memorial Room has been rebuilt on the top floor. A rooftop garden on the seventh floor looks over the city.
Photo: The wub · CC BY-SA 4.0
The Salle Ovale (Oval Room) of the Richelieu site has desks arranged in a ring under a glass ceiling. For a long time only researchers could enter. After 12 years of renovation it opened free to everyone in 2022.
Photo: Jean-Pierre Dalbéra · CC BY 2.0
Michelangelo designed it for the Medici pope Clement VII. The flowing staircase that almost fills the vestibule and the wooden reading desks Michelangelo designed himself both survive.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain,_Petersdom_--_2013_--_4192.jpg?width=500)
The library of the Holy See, formally founded by Pope Sixtus IV. It holds more than 80,000 manuscripts and many early printed books. The Sistine Hall, built in the 16th century, is covered in frescoes on its walls and ceiling.
Photo: Dietmar Rabich · CC BY-SA 4.0_Biblioteca_Nazionale_Marciana_-_Interior.jpg?width=500)
A Renaissance building facing St Mark's Square, called by Palladio the most beautiful building since antiquity. The ceiling of the great hall carries round paintings by Veronese, Titian and other Venetian painters.
Photo: Didier Descouens · Public domain
The largest art-history library in the Netherlands, inside the Rijksmuseum. A four-storey cast-iron spiral staircase and galleries surround the stacks. Cuypers, who designed the museum, built it too.
Photo: Michael D Beckwith · CC0
The roof is a grassy hill where students lie down to rest. A cone pierces the hill, and inside, one whole wall is a four-storey blue bookcase.
Photo: Mecanoo · CC BY-SA 4.0
A 'mountain of books' built from shelves inside a glass pyramid. The shelves are visible from outside, so the whole library works like a billboard for books. The path climbing the mountain is 480 metres long.
Photo: G.Lanting · CC BY-SA 3.0
A tilted box of black granite and glass reflected in the canal. A bridge links it to the old Royal Library building, so you can cross from the new building into the old reading rooms. The water is visible through the white atrium.
Photo: Sintakso · CC0
The largest public library in Scandinavia, built beside the harbour. When a baby is born at the city hospital, the parents press a button to ring a large tube-shaped bell inside the library. It won the IFLA Public Library of the Year award in 2016.
Photo: SmartDrones Aarhus · CC0
A glass mountain modelled on the 'castle of light' of Latvian folklore. At the opening, more than 10,000 people lined up and passed books hand to hand from the old building to the new one. The atrium has a five-storey 'Books of the People' shelf filled with books donated by citizens.
Photo: Ken Eckert · CC BY-SA 4.0
Hungary's oldest monastery, founded in 996. The neoclassical library built in the 1830s holds about 400,000 volumes. The oldest document written in Hungarian came from the archive here. It became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996.
Photo: Pasztilla aka Attila Terbócs · CC BY-SA 4.0
A Benedictine abbey founded in 1144, rebuilt in its present baroque form after the Swedes destroyed it in 1645. The architect Joseph Munggenast brought in Paul Troger for frescoes and Franz Josef Holzinger for stucco. The library hall is one of the lavishly decorated spaces that resulted. It lies in the Waldviertel, 30 kilometres north of Krems.
Photo: Uoaei1 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Founded in 1953 to hold the collection of the mining magnate Alfred Chester Beatty, and the present museum opened inside Dublin Castle in 2000. It was named European Museum of the Year in 2002. Two galleries, 'Sacred Traditions' and 'Arts of the Book', show manuscripts and objects from around the world. Despite the name, you tour it like a museum.
Photo: Charles Curling (CharlieCLC) · CC BY-SA 3.0
A Benedictine abbey in Bavaria founded in the 8th century. The baroque library ceiling is covered in thick stucco and frescoes, and muscular figures of Atlas hold it up.
Photo: Unknown authorUnknown author · Public domain
A four-storey reading room sits inside a bulging glass-and-aluminium shell shaped like a brain, which is why it is called 'the Berlin Brain'. Air circulates between the outer shell and the inner building for natural ventilation.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 3.0
The cylindrical domed building that symbolises Oxford and was Britain's first circular library. 'Camera' is Latin for room. It is now a reading room of the Bodleian Library.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 4.0
Built with money left by Christopher Codrington, so it is called the Codrington Library. In contrast to the Gothic-style quad outside, the inside is a classical long white hall with tall bookcases along both walls.
Photo: Farradane · CC BY-SA 3.0
A striped glass cube with an atrium that twists like a whirlwind all the way to the top. Looking down, each floor has a different shape, like the inside of a conch shell.
Photo: Temple of Mara · CC BY-SA 3.0
On the square in front of the Panthéon. Two rows of slim cast-iron arches carry the ceiling of the first-floor reading room, and it is remembered in architectural history as one of the first public buildings to show its iron structure openly. The long tables with green lamps are famous.
Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen · CC BY 2.0 fr
Founded by Cardinal Mazarin, it is the oldest public library in France. It is inside the Institut de France. The reading room still has its 17th-century shelving and Corinthian columns.
Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen · CC BY 2.0 fr
Founded by Cardinal Federico Borromeo, it is one of the first public libraries in Europe. It holds the Codex Atlanticus, a bound set of more than 1,100 sheets of Leonardo da Vinci's notes. The art gallery in the same building has Caravaggio's Basket of Fruit.
Photo: Christelle Molinié · CC BY-SA 4.0![Biblioteca Angelica](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Biblioteca_Angelica_Ambiente_"Vaso"_del_Vanvitelli.jpg?width=500)
Founded in 1604 and opened to the public in 1609, it is one of the first public libraries in Europe. The reading room 'Vaso', remodelled by Vanvitelli in the 18th century, is surrounded by two levels of wooden shelves and a gallery.
Photo: Rivetti Giancarlo · CC BY-SA 4.0
A strange building with 99 white domes of various sizes wrapped in a metal mesh. It often appears on lists of the world's strangest buildings. It is explained as a mix of Byzantine and Islamic architecture, and opinions are sharply divided.
Photo: Arianselmani · CC BY-SA 3.0.jpg?width=500)
A ducal library: Duke Julius began collecting books around 1550 and issued its first library ordinance in 1572. It is considered internationally important for its medieval and early modern European holdings. The German Enlightenment writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing worked here as librarian.
Photo: User:Brunswyk · CC BY-SA 3.0
The Book Tower (Boekentoren), opened in 1942, is the landmark building of Ghent University Library. Henry van de Velde designed it, and it stands next to the Blandijn building that houses the arts faculty. The collection began when the university, founded in 1817, received books confiscated during the French period.
Photo: Michiel Hendryckx · CC BY-SA 3.0
Five tiers of galleries with black cast-iron railings rise to a glass ceiling, which is why it is called a 'cathedral of books'. It is a research library of Johns Hopkins University.
Photo: Matthew Petroff · CC BY-SA 3.0
The first building of the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world. It is known for the marble Great Hall and the octagonal Main Reading Room under a round dome. You can see a re-created Thomas Jefferson library, the collection he sold to Congress, and a Gutenberg Bible.
Photo: MallardTV · CC0.jpg?width=500)
A Beaux-Arts building guarded by the stone lions Patience and Fortitude on the Fifth Avenue steps. The third-floor Rose Main Reading Room is almost 90 metres long, with long tables under an ornate ceiling painted with clouds.
Photo: ajay_suresh · CC BY 2.0
A building of offset boxes wrapped in diamond-patterned glass and steel mesh. The 'Books Spiral', one continuous ramp of shelving through four floors, lets you walk in call-number order without stairs.
Photo: Moody75 · CC BY-SA 2.0
The first large free municipal library in the United States. Bates Hall on the second floor has rows of green lamps under a barrel vault. There is also a room with John Singer Sargent's murals and a courtyard garden.
Photo: Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 2.5
It was banker J. P. Morgan's private library. The East Room has three-storey walnut shelves, and the upper level can be reached only by a hidden staircase. It owns three Gutenberg Bibles.
Photo: Plvlarlc · CC BY-SA 4.0
It has no windows at all. The walls are made of thin slabs of marble, so from inside, sunlight passes through the stone and glows amber. The rare books are held in a six-storey glass tower at the centre. A Gutenberg Bible is on display.
Photo: Michael Kastelic · CC BY-SA 4.0
A university library with Gothic spires. Its second-floor Reading Room, with a high vaulted ceiling and stained glass, is nicknamed the 'Harry Potter room'.
Photo: Guywelch2000 · CC BY 4.0
Its features are a facade of repeating hexagonal windows and a timber atrium that widens upward past the entrance arch. A light-rail line runs underneath, so the building seems to float like a bridge.
Photo: Uzoma Ozurumba · CC BY-SA 4.0
A subscription library begun in 1753 that merged with another library in 1836. The shelves and reading spaces are inside a Greek Revival temple-like building. Anyone may enter the building, but only members can borrow books. In 1848, poet Sarah Helen Whitman is said to have ended her relationship with Edgar Allan Poe inside the building.
Photo: Kenneth C. Zirkel · CC BY-SA 3.0
It consists of the Goodhue Building, opened in 1926, and the Tom Bradley addition, added in 1993. The Goodhue Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1970. By collection size it is the third-largest public library in the United States. The round hall, the Rotunda, has a mural by Dean Cornwell.
Photo: Daniel L. Lu (user:dllu) · Public domain
Vancouver Public Library is the largest library system in British Columbia, with 21 locations, and its Central Library opened at Library Square in 1995. It is known for an oval exterior resembling the Roman Colosseum and a glass-roofed lobby. Moshe Safdie designed it.
Photo: Andrew Raun · CC BY-SA 2.0.jpg?width=500)
A Gothic library built like a cathedral. The circulation desk sits where the altar would be at the end of the entrance hall, and there are stained-glass windows throughout.
Photo: Karl Thomas Moore · CC BY-SA 4.0
A brutalist building that looks like stairs stacked upside down on concrete pillars. It is named for Theodor Geisel, the author known as Dr. Seuss. It often appears in science-fiction films and in the university's logo.
Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/belisario/ · CC BY-SA 2.0
A 16-sided Gothic domed building behind the Parliament building. It was closed at the time of the 1916 fire and was the only part of the Centre Block to survive. Shelves carved from white pine surround a statue of Queen Victoria at the centre of the dome.
Photo: Ashwin Kumar · CC BY-SA 2.0
A storage library of the University of Chicago with a reading room under an elliptical glass dome. Underground, high-density shelving holds 3.5 million volumes, and a robotic crane takes about three minutes on average to retrieve a book. The architect is Helmut Jahn, who worked in Chicago. The university built it to keep most of its collection on campus.
Photo: IceUnshattered · CC BY-SA 4.0
Shelves seem to hang in layers in mid-air inside a glass box, which is why it is called the 'Megabiblioteca'. At the centre hangs Matrix Mobile, a whale skeleton decorated with graphite drawings by Gabriel Orozco.
Photo: Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0
A reading room founded by Portuguese who had emigrated to Brazil. Behind a neo-Manueline facade like stone lace is a reading room with three-storey wooden shelves and a stained-glass ceiling. It holds the largest collection of Portuguese-language books outside Portugal.
Photo: PedroTorres2002 · CC BY-SA 4.0Established when Bishop Juan de Palafox of Puebla gave 5,000 books to a seminary, it is regarded as the first public library in the Americas. The 18th-century hall with three tiers of wooden shelves remains as it was. It is on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register.
Photo: José P. Torrealba · CC BY 3.0-Medellin.JPG?width=500)
Three black rock-like blocks sit above a hillside neighbourhood called Santo Domingo Savio. The Spanish government helped fund it, and at night light shines from inside. In 2008 it won the best-architecture-of-the-year award at the Ibero-American Architecture and Urban Design Biennial. Besides the library, it serves as a cultural space for local residents.
Photo: SajoR · CC BY-SA 2.5
All four walls are covered by Juan O'Gorman's mosaic mural Historical Representation of Culture, made of pieces of natural stone. It opened on 5 April 1956 and became the best-known building on the Ciudad Universitaria campus, which became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007. The collection is over 1.4 million volumes.
Photo: Daniel Case · CC BY-SA 3.0
It began as the Public Library of Buenos Aires, founded by decree of the revolutionary government of May 1810, and its first director was Mariano Moreno. The present building, opened in 1992 in the Recoleta district, is brutalist architecture. The poet Jorge Luis Borges was once its director.
Photo: ProtoplasmaKid · CC BY-SA 4.0
A book pavilion built in 1561 by the Ming official Fan Qin, and one of the oldest surviving private libraries in China. 'Tianyi' in its name means water in a commentary on the Book of Changes, a wish to ward off fire. Its collection, at its peak over 70,000 volumes, shrank to 13,000 by the 1940s and has since grown again through donations and collecting. You visit the building and garden together.
Photo: Zhangzhugang · CC BY-SA 3.0
A complex that houses the Gifu City Central Library, opened in 2015. It is a new kind of public library that puts a library and civic activity space in one building. Since the new building opened, visitors have grown tenfold to 1.35 million a year, with many families.
Photo: sunoochi · CC BY 2.0
A huge ball-shaped auditorium sits in the middle of white terraced shelves that undulate from floor to ceiling, which is why it is called 'the Eye of Binhai'. It became a talking point when it was reported that, at the opening, many of the upper shelves were out of reach and filled with printed images of books.
Photo: Muzzleflash · CC0.jpg?width=500)
A box-shaped building whose white wall is pierced by more than 6,000 small round windows. Inside is a single reading room with slender columns and a high ceiling, and light entering through the holes spreads evenly all day.
Photo: Asturio Cantabrio · CC BY-SA 4.0
The old Seoul City Hall building, built in 1926, was renovated and reopened as a library in 2012. The tall wall of shelves made by opening up the first and second floors is well known from photographs, and the former mayor's office has been restored on the third floor.
Photo: SJ Yang · Public domain
An open library in the middle of COEX Mall with three 13-metre bookcases. Anyone can take a book and read it without signing up. Since opening it has become a leading photo spot in Seoul.
Photo: LR0725 · CC BY-SA 4.0
The building houses more than 81,000 woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana, the Buddhist canon carved during the Goryeo dynasty. Windows of different sizes at front and back, and a floor laid with charcoal and salt, control humidity and airflow, and have kept the blocks safe for more than 500 years. The halls became a World Heritage Site in 1995 and the woodblocks a Memory of the World item in 2007.
Photo: Bernard Gagnon · CC0
A multi-use library designed in 1995 and opened in 2001. Inside a glass-and-metal shell, bundles of slender steel tubes hold up flat floor plates. By day it blends with its surroundings, and at night interior lighting makes it look like a lantern of many colours. The ground floor is an open space where the street continues inside. It came through the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake without major damage.
Photo: scarletgreen from Japan · CC BY 2.0
The company that runs Tsutaya bookstores took over its operation and added a bookshop and cafe, making it the first 'Tsutaya Library'. It is known for a warm interior with wooden shelves rising along the walls. Handing a public library over to a private company also caused a lot of controversy.
Photo: Asacyan · CC BY-SA 3.0
Concrete arches of different sizes cross in curves. Arches, not columns, divide the space, and the reading room, whose floor slopes slightly along the hill, continues like a forest.
Photo: Masashige MOTOE · CC BY-SA 2.0
Tadao Ando renovated the Imperial Library building of 1906 and it opened as a children's library in 2002. A glass box set into the old Renaissance-style brick building lets you see the old outer walls from inside.
Photo: Wiiii · CC BY-SA 3.0
The library occupies Hamid Manzil, the palace of the princely state of Rampur. Inside the white Indo-Islamic palace are Arabic and Persian manuscripts and Mughal miniatures.
Photo: Originally uploaded by Ariannarama (Transferred by rohith_goura) · Public domain
A white neoclassical building lined with Doric columns. The front steps are well known as a location for films and photographs. Inside are old books, including a 14th-century manuscript of Dante's Divine Comedy.
Photo: A.Savin · FAL
Korea's national library, which opened in 1945. It stands on a hill in Banpo-dong, Seocho District. It receives and preserves every book published in Korea and has a rare-books room with old books and old maps.
Photo: User:Piotrus · CC BY-SA 3.0A public library in Uijeongbu built around art books, with reading space and exhibition space in the same building.
Two 16-storey blocks on Victoria Street are joined by bridges on the upper floors. The collection is over 2.5 million items, and it is the largest public library in Southeast Asia. The library's history goes back to 1823. The present building opened in 2005.
Photo: Leongyy02 · CC BY-SA 4.0
Opened in 1856, it is the oldest public library in Australia. The octagonal La Trobe Reading Room, completed in 1913, has desks set out radially under a 35-metre dome.
Photo: Diliff · CC BY 2.5
It opened on 12 October 2018 to replace the central library that closed after the 2011 earthquake. It stands on the north-east side of Cathedral Square, facing Gloucester Street and Colombo Street, and was one of the anchor projects of the city-centre rebuild.
Photo: Sgerbic · CC BY-SA 4.0
The Mitchell Library reading room, built of sandstone, is a large room under a glass roof, with wooden desks and a two-storey gallery. The foyer floor has a marble mosaic of Abel Tasman's voyage map.
Photo: Wpcpey · CC BY-SA 4.0
Built by his son in honour of Celsus, governor of the Roman province of Asia, it is said to have held about 12,000 scrolls. The two-storey facade that fell in an earthquake was rebuilt in the 1970s and is now the most photographed scene at Ephesus.
Photo: Benh LIEU SONG · CC BY-SA 3.0
Built to revive the ancient Library of Alexandria. Under a 160-metre disc-shaped roof tilted toward the sea is a huge reading room that steps down in terraces. The outer granite wall is carved with characters from scripts around the world.
Photo: Pfctdayelise · CC BY-SA 3.0
The whole building is one reading room. A white floor folded up at its four corners becomes terraced shelving, and in a sunken area at the centre a marble-walled space displays rare old manuscripts.
Photo: Mohammed Abdul Mutallib · CC BY-SA 4.0
The building is modelled on the rahla, the wooden stand used to hold an open Qur'an, and stands on the bank of Dubai Creek. The seventh floor holds old Arabic manuscripts, maps and rare books.
Photo: Vicharam · CC BY-SA 4.0
The library belongs to a mosque and school founded in 859 by Fatima al-Fihri. It is considered the oldest library still operating. The architect Aziza Chaouni restored it over several years and it reopened in 2016.
Photo: Abdel Hassouni · CC BY-SA 4.0Descriptions were written from Wikipedia and each library's own information, and not every detail has been checked against the sources. Admission fees, booking rules and opening hours change often, so check the library's website before you go. Photos are loaded from Wikimedia Commons, and the author and licence are shown on each card and at the bottom of the detail panel. Map base © Esri.
"Beautiful Libraries of the World" is a map of 100 libraries worth visiting, chosen from 40 countries. They range from old libraries such as the Long Room at Trinity College Dublin, Admont Abbey in Austria and the Joanina Library in Coimbra to recent public libraries such as Stockholm City Library, Helsinki's Oodi and Stuttgart City Library. The list is ordered with the best-known, most visitable and best-photographed libraries first. It is meant for people planning a library trip, and for anyone who has seen a photo of a library and wants to know where it is.