This isn’t much of a post – I just received this link in my inbox this morning and I had to share. It’s a gallery of some of the most beautiful (perhaps ‘striking’) libraries in the world. I think I love almost all of them. Each appeals to a different emotion, but they all express the beauty and freedom of knowledge, the physical imagery of hard-bound books (either in the struck order of the Grimm Library or the frayed pages suggested by the Beijing Library), and a reverence for the written word. It’s also the case that I’m completely obsessed with beautiful architecture. It presents a problem every time we move house and I get hooked on something for aesthetic reasons and forget all about the practical.

One library that got missed by this list was the Fisher Fine Arts Library on (my alma mater) Penn’s campus designed by Frank Furness.