THE JOURNAL
Binhai Library, Tianjin, China. Photograph by Mr Ossip van Duivenbode, courtesy of MVRDV
Five of the most photogenic book temples on the planet.
The best libraries in the world always exist in the imagination or in the memory. Think of Mr Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library Of Babel, a universe of endless interlocking hexagons containing (somewhere) every book that could ever possibly be written, or the planet-sized 51st-century book palace in the Doctor Who episode “Silence In The Library”, or the Great Library of Alexandria, which was destroyed by fire in the first century. For me, the honey-coloured stone of the Bodleian Library’s Radcliffe Camera in Oxford will always stir something special, as will the more mundane promise of Dorking public library in suburban Surrey, where I grew up.
But, as Mr Massimo Listri’s lavishly illustrated The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries reveals, there are dozens and dozens of quite stunning book temples still in situ around the world. Here are five of the best as a taster.
Wren Library
Wren Library, Trinity College Cambridge, UK. Photograph by Mr Keith Taylor/Alamy
Trinity College Cambridge, UK
Sir Christopher Wren didn’t only design St Paul’s Cathedral in London. He also turned his hand to library design, and the beautiful library in Trinity College Cambridge bears not only his name but his architectural imprint. Completed in 1695, this elegant room has a chess-board floor and a high, airy plaster vault above. Between the two is warm wood shelving and the glorious smell of old books, more than 70,000 of which were printed before 1820. The marble statues and busts (atop the shelves as well as at eye level) and a stained glass window, as they say in fashion magazines, complete the look. There are treasures within, too – more than 1,000 medieval manuscripts originally catalogued by Mr M R James, Sir Isaac Newton’s notebooks, a 14th-century copy of Piers Plowman and the original manuscript of Winnie-The-Pooh.
George Peabody Library
George Peabody Library, Peabody Institute, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA. Photograph by Mr Ian Dagnall/Alamy
Baltimore, USA
Described by its first provost as a “cathedral of books”, the crowning glory of the 300,000-book college library at Johns Hopkins University is the stack room, a six-tier showstopper with slender classical columns and wrought-iron railings touched with gold leaf. The floor is tiled in a jazzy but restrained Art Deco black and white, and the skylight that floods the atrium with light is more than 60ft above the floor. It’s not just for reading, either. Bibliophiles can hire it out for weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs.
Binhai Library
Binhai Library, Tianjin, China. Photograph by Mr Ossip van Duivenbode, courtesy of MVRDV
Tianjin, China
Not all the great libraries are ancient repositories of dusty old books. Thrill, for instance, at the modern marvel that is the Binhai Library in Tianjin, China. Its 200,000-book collection, so far just one-sixth of capacity, is housed in an astounding building with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in terraces of tranquil science-fictional white. And it’s the only library that reads its readers. A huge oval opening in the front of the library gives passers-by a view of the great luminous sphere that serves as its centrepiece and has earned it the nickname “The Eye”. It had 10,000 visitors a day eyeballing it in the weeks after it opened in 2017.
The Old Library
The Old Library, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Photograph by Mr Harry Cory Wright, courtesy of Thames & Hudson Ltd and The Board of Trinity College, the University of Dublin
Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
This is where you come to see the illuminated Book Of Kells, one of treasures of early Irish Christianity that dates back to the ninth century, and the 14th-century Brian Boru harp, thought to be the oldest harp in the world. The library itself, a 200ft-long room with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, marble busts of literary eminences and two-storey floor-to-ceiling shelves, was built in the early 18th century. It’s thought to have been the model for the Jedi archives in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack Of The Clones, although director Mr George Lucas denies it.
Biblioteca Joanina
Biblioteca Joanina, Coimbra, Portugal. Photograph by Mr Massimo Listri, courtesy of Taschen
**Coimbra, Portugal **
As well as being among the most gorgeous libraries in the world, with painted ceilings, carvings in oak and teak and glorious baroque decorative flourishes splashed with gilt, Coimbra’s 18th-century university library has some cool extra features. It’s one of the few libraries in the world, for instance, with its own prison, which will make you think twice about incurring any late fees. It also has a resident colony of bats, which help the library by eating insects that would otherwise prey on the books, but hinder it by dropping guano all over the place, which has to be cleaned up every morning.
The Library of Trinity College Dublin by Mr Harry Cory Wright, published by Thames & Hudson, and The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries by Mr Massimo Listri, published by Taschen.
