Since ancient times, libraries have been repositories of invaluable knowledge. With the development of the Internet, of course, their role has become somewhat less significant, but let’s not forget that many of them store truly unique exhibits. In addition, a special atmosphere always reigns in libraries, which fills the soul of every book lover with peace and joy.
In Germany, in Magdeburg, there is an interesting library, the building for which was built from old beer boxes. The Singapore Public Library has many, many separate reading rooms so that visitors do not hear each other. A library with an extremely unusual design is in Italian Perugia – it was built in the form of a flying saucer. In the USA, Kansas, there is a library, which is made in the form of a huge bookshelf. A small library is even on board the International Space Station. This is currently the only library in space. There are about a hundred books in it. Opened under the auspices of the Library of Congress, the World Digital Library is the world’s largest digital book repository. Now all the books on the library shelves are put outward with their roots so that the name can be seen. But before they were placed with roots inside. A system for classifying books by genre first appeared in ancient China. The Marriott hotel in Shanghai, the most populated city in the world, has a library located on one of the upper floors, at an altitude of almost a quarter kilometer. In New York, there are free public mini-libraries, some kind of booths for one reader with books inside. Anyone can use them.
The National Library of France was founded about 7 centuries ago. Since then she has moved several times, but she still works. The most ancient of the still functioning libraries is the one located in the monastery of St. Catherine in the territory of modern Egypt. It is about 1.5 thousand years old. The Norwegian public library system is very convenient. Books do not have to be returned to the branch where they were taken from – you can safely return them to any of them. In Finland, there is the town of Vantaa, in the public library of which one day someone threw a book taken from there about a century ago. It was not possible to establish the identity of the one who returned it. Most likely, the man was afraid of a gigantic fine for late payment. The famous Yale University has a windowless library. But there is enough light there even without them, since its outer wall is made of expensive marble that partially transmits sunlight. In the UK, every author has the right to publish his books in public libraries, but you have to pay a little for this. The Haskell Library is unique in its own way – located on the Canadian-American border, it is located on the territory of two states at once.
The world’s largest library of the world is the American Library of Congress. But thanks to modern technology, all of her books have been digitized just in case, and an array of hard drives of only 15 TB is enough to store them. Andrew Carnegie, an incredibly wealthy American industrialist who lived about a hundred years ago, at his own expense built and equipped more than 2500 libraries in different countries. About 1,600 of them are in the United States. It is known that the Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible had a huge library. However, she was lost, and some are still trying to find her. When a book is published in Norway, the government prints a thousand copies at its own expense, which are then sent to public libraries throughout the country. The port of the ancient Egyptian city of Alexandria was visited by many ships. The Alexandrian authorities levied a special tax on them – books. Each captain was required to provide a book that was not in the Alexandria Library. The original was sent to it, and the copy was returned to the owner. There are about one and a half hundred libraries in the world where a book teller reads a book to a visitor aloud.
In the USA, a country where fast food is extremely popular, there are still more free public libraries than McDonald’s fast food establishments. The aforementioned Library of Congress is not only the largest in the world, but also the most visited. There are about 155 million books in it, and about 1.7 million visitors annually. In total, about 130 million unique publications are stored in the libraries of the world. The oldest library created by the Sumerian civilization existed in the middle of the 2nd millennium BC. Historians know Abdul Kassim Ismail, the great vizier of Persia, who was very fond of reading. Going somewhere, he always took with him his entire library, in which there were more than 140 thousand books. They transported her on a caravan of four hundred camels. In the now lost library of Alexandria, more than 200 thousand scrolls were stored.
