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Whether it's a paneled monastery library, the reading room of an esteemed university, a famous private library, or a personal home library that reflects one's own biography – book collections and libraries are places of comfort, oases of silence, and at the same time overflowing with ideas, possibilities, histories, alternative worlds, and undiscovered things. They provide space for focused work, modern humanities, and analytical thinking, yet they are also places of contemplation, dreaming, and remembering.

On this photographic expedition, Massimo Listri visits some of the oldest and most beautiful libraries in the world to reveal their architectural, historical, and imaginative wonders. Through large wooden doors, up spiral staircases, and along exquisite corridors lined with shelves, he guides us through outstanding private, public, educational, and monastery libraries that date back to the year 766. These institutions from the Middle Ages, Classicism, Baroque, Rococo, and the 19th century house some of the most valuable records of human thought and action, documented and printed in manuscripts, volumes, papyrus scrolls, and incunabula.

In each of these libraries, Listri's evocative images capture not only the unique atmosphere of the library but also its most valuable collections and design details. Featured libraries include the papal collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library and the Trinity College Library in Dublin, where the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow are kept. The careful descriptions accompanying each library not only inform about the astonishing collections – some highlights of which are illustrated – but also about their often eventful, turbulent, or controversial pasts. For example, the Franciscan monastery in Lima, Peru, with its wealth of archived treasures.

Actual product image Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries. 40th Ed (English, French, German, George Ruppel, Elisabeth Sladek, Massimo Listri, 2023)

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Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries. 40th Ed

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