Libraries of the World

A library is one of the few public buildings that belongs to everyone who walks in. This section travels between them: national collections that hold the printed memory of a country, city libraries that double as living rooms, and village reading rooms with a few thousand volumes and a queue at the door on Saturday morning.

We look at what makes each one particular. Some libraries are famous for their collections, others for their buildings, others for the simple fact that they stayed open when nothing else did. A library in a dense capital solves different problems from one serving a valley by van, and both are worth understanding.

The stories here overlap with the rest of the site. If the shape of a building is what draws you, Library Architecture looks at why reading rooms are designed the way they are. If you want to know what a library does beyond lending books, start with The Modern Library. And Types of Libraries is the map: it sorts public, national, university, special and stranger institutions into an order you can hold in your head.

Nothing here is a ranking. Comparing a research library with three hundred years of legal deposit against a two-room branch built last year tells you very little. Describing each one honestly tells you more, so that is what we try to do.