The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World

A gallery of library interiors where the books themselves are the architecture: baroque monastery halls, domed national reading rooms, cast-iron stacks and a few modern buildings that rethink what shelves can do. To earn a place, a room had to be one where the shelves and reading space are the spectacle, not just the building around them. Each photo shows the room itself, with its city, the date it was built or opened and the feature that stops people in the doorway. Visiting varies a great deal: some rooms are free to walk into, some are seen only on tours or from a doorway, and a few, such as Stockholm's rotunda and Canada's Library of Parliament, are closed for restoration, as each caption notes. Bookshops have their own gallery.