Admont Abbey Library

Admont Abbey Library is the largest monastic library in the world, and its hall was built to be looked at as well as used. It belongs to Admont Abbey, in a small town on the River Enns in Styria, Austria. The collection runs to around 200,000 books, and the library is known as much for its baroque art and architecture as for its manuscripts.

The hall went up quickly. Work began in 1774 and was finished in 1776, to a design by Josef Hueber. His model was the Imperial Court Library in Vienna, so an abbey in a small town received a room shaped by the imperial capital. The result is a white and gold space under painted ceilings, a setting that rewards standing still and looking up.

The more recent story is about attention. In 2018 the abbey made a deliberate choice to lead with the library in its publicity and began posting on several platforms. By 2022 its Facebook following had grown from 4,500 to 160,000. Over the same years, ticket sales rose from about ten thousand to sixty thousand.

A room designed in the 1770s to impress visitors turned out to suit the camera just as well. Admont is a clear case of what social media can do for a library when the building itself is the picture. It also appears in our tour of beautiful libraries around the world, alongside other monastic and university halls.