When you visit a city libraries aren’t often the first places of attraction and yet these goodies, more or less known, contain secrets and stories that are hidden in the pages of books and in the historic walls.
Walker Library – built in 1911 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the library take the name from TB Walker, president of the library, art collector and businessman.
The Tripitaka Koreana Library – a large library en plein air with wooden tablets containing Buddhist scriptures and located inside the Temple Haein-Sa, South Korea. The Tripitaka Koreana is the most complete collection of Buddhist texts, engraved on 80,000 wooden blocks between 1237 and 1248.
Admont Abbey Library – located in the Benedictine monastery on the river Enns, in Admont, Austria, the Abbey contains the largest monastic library in the world.
New York Public Library – the library of the Big Apple is the third largest in North America and consists in 87 libraries divided into branches in all the districts. In total, more than fifty million articles and over twenty million books.
National Library of the Czech Republic – in the center of Prague, the national library contains more than 6 million documents included materials from Turkey, Iran and India.
Biblioteca Nacional de Chile – the library was originally located in the center of Santiago, where there is now the Municipal Theatre of the city. To mark the centenary of the Chile’s independence. it was moved on Avenida Libertador General Bernardo O’Higgins.
George Peabody Library – built by George Peabody to honor the hospitality and kindness of the people of Baltimore, the library is one of many public works, in United States and England, founded by the US entrepreneur, banker and philanthropist, the first American to be buried in Westminster Abbey.
Bibliotheque Mazarine – the oldest public library in France, located in the sixth arrondissement of Paris, was originally the private library of Cardinal Mazarin who then left it to the Collège des Quatre-Nations which he had founded in 1661.
The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura – built in 1887 in Rio de Janeiro is the second largest library in the world for number of books in Portuguese.
Raza Library – in Rampur, India, the library boasts rare and precious manuscripts, historical documents, specimens of Islamic calligraphy and works in Arabic and Persian. Inside even the original manuscript of the first translation of the Koran.
Trinity College Library – the library of the University of Dublin is the largest library of Ireland and boasts precious manuscripts and the famous Book of Kells, a ceremonial book in four volumes containing the Gospels.
