Libraries

I have always been fascinated by libraries. These could be real places, or they could - equally impressively - be fictional entities that play a role in works of fiction, such as the famous labyrinthine library of the distant and wind-swept lonely monastery in Umberto Eco´s Name of the Rose (even though that wasn´t real but based on an amalgam of libraries in the writer´s imagination.) The eighteenth century ´rendition´ of this mysterious fictional Abbey, the Abbey of Melk, is shown below. Wouldn´t you just want to be there to breathe the words, thoughts, scents, and emotions of old in this amazingly beautiful repository of knowledge?

A while ago Mieke sent me a photo of a beautiful library, the Philosophical Hall, a Baroque reading room in Prague´s 868-year-old Strahov monastery library, holding just about every important book available in central Europe at the end of the 18th century — more or less the sum total of human knowledge at the time. It made me think of a library Niki and I visited in Mafra, close to Lisbon, in the Palacio Nacional de Mafra. The latter has en entirely different ´feel´ to it, although it is equally impressive - its colours are less vibrant, more subdued, milky than, for instance, the Prague library. Does anybody know of any other architecturally beautiful or otherwise impressive libraries around the world?

The library of the Melk Abbey, Austria

The library of the Palácio Nacional in Mafra, Portugal

The library of the Strahov Monastery library, Czech. (Go here to ´walk inside´ this library, thanks to a 3D photography project only recently completed in March 2011. It takes a while to ´get´ the controls, but then it´s worth it)