The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World
27 places in 16 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful libraries in the world are Clementinum (Czech Republic), Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (United States) and Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Italy). The list covers 27 libraries in 16 countries. The United States has the most, with 7. Last updated 13 October 2026.
A beautiful library makes knowledge visible. Rows of leather spines rise through galleries to painted ceilings, globes stand in the aisles, and daylight is managed as carefully as the books it must not harm. The great reading rooms of monasteries, universities and nations were built as statements about what a community valued, and the best of them still give the feeling of walking into a mind laid out in wood, stone and gold.
The libraries in this collection range from Baroque halls to modern experiments. The Clementinum in Prague holds a Baroque library hall from the early 18th century, and the Abbey Library of St. Gallen in Switzerland, with its Rococo hall, guards one of the oldest monastic collections in Europe. Admont Abbey in Austria has the largest monastery library in the world. In Florence, Michelangelo designed the vestibule and staircase of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, while the Long Room of Trinity College Dublin stretches under a barrel vault of dark wood. Yale's Beinecke Library filters light through thin panels of marble, and Juan O'Gorman covered the Central Library of UNAM in Mexico City with stone mosaics.
The libraries were chosen for how they look and are ordered by beauty. Every one has its own text, a photograph with the photographer named and a location on the map, and the section can also be explored country by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Clementinum | Library building | Czech Republic | |
| 2 | Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library | Library building | United States | |
| 3 | Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana | Library building | Italy | |
| 4 | Radcliffe Camera | Library building | United Kingdom | |
| 5 | Abbey Library of St. Gallen | Library building | Switzerland | |
| 6 | State Library Victoria | Library building | Australia | |
| 7 | Library of Parliament (Ottawa) | Library building | Canada | |
| 8 | Antiquarium (Munich Residenz) | Library building | Germany | |
| 9 | Thomas Jefferson Building | Library building | United States | |
| 10 | Strahov Monastery Library | Library building | Czech Republic | |
| 11 | Chicago Cultural Center | Library building | United States | |
| 12 | Sainte-Geneviève Library | Library building | France | |
| 13 | George Peabody Library | Library building | United States | |
| 14 | Admont Abbey | Library building | Austria | |
| 15 | Tianjin Binhai Library | Library building | People's Republic of China | |
| 16 | Central Library of UNAM, Mexico City | Library building | Mexico | ✓ |
| 17 | Biblioteca Joanina | Library building | Portugal | |
| 18 | Biblioteca Palafoxiana | Library building | Mexico | |
| 19 | Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading | Library building | Brazil | |
| 20 | John Rylands Library | Library building | United Kingdom | |
| 21 | Duchess Anna Amalia Library | Library building | Germany | |
| 22 | The Morgan Library & Museum | Library building | United States | |
| 23 | Janggyeon Panjeon of Haeinsa | Library building | South Korea | |
| 24 | Old Library, Trinity College Dublin | Library building | Ireland | |
| 25 | New York Public Library Main Branch | Library building | United States | |
| 26 | Boston Public Library, McKim Building | Library building | United States | |
| 27 | State Hall of the Austrian National Library | Library building | Austria |
01 Clementinum
Klementinum
Czech Republic · 0.5 km from Prague50.087° N 14.416° E
VitVit · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Clementinum is less a single building than a small town of learning, folded into the Old Town of Prague a few steps from the Charles Bridge. Its site was held by Dominicans in the thirteenth century; in 1556 the Jesuits arrived and slowly turned it into one of the largest colleges their order ran anywhere, a complex of courtyards, churches, lecture halls and observatories that today covers roughly two hectares. The great Baroque rebuilding came between 1709 and 1726, with Carlo Lurago, František Maxmilián Kaňka and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer among the architects who shaped it over the decades. After the order was suppressed in 1773, the library founded here in 1781 grew into what is now the National Library of the Czech Republic, which still occupies the complex.
Did you know? The Clementinum is the second-largest building complex in Prague after Prague Castle, with five courtyards, two churches and two chapels.
02 Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
United States · 3.1 km from New Haven41.312° N 72.927° W
Michael Kastelic · CC BY-SA 4.0 From outside, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library looks like a sealed stone box: a windowless block of pale panels set in a stone grid. The trick is revealed only indoors. The panels are thin slabs of veined Vermont marble, milled to about 1.25 inches, and in daylight they glow a warm amber, lighting the interior like lantern paper while keeping direct sun away from fragile pages. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it, and it opened on Yale's Hewitt Quadrangle in October 1963, the gift of Edwin and Frederick W. Beinecke and Johanna Weigle, widow of their brother Walter.
Did you know? Gordon Bunshaft said the idea for the glowing marble walls came from alabaster he had seen in a bathhouse of Istanbul's Dolmabahçe Palace, which he took for onyx.
03 Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana
Italy · 0.7 km from Florence43.775° N 11.255° E
No machine-readable author provided. Richardfabi~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain The Laurentian Library begins with a shock: a tall, narrow vestibule where columns are sunk into the walls, windows are blind, and a great staircase seems to pour down from the reading room like lava. Designed by Michelangelo for the Medici, it is one of the founding works of Mannerist architecture, a building that bends the classical rules on purpose.
Did you know? Mark Rothko said the vestibule and staircase walls of the library influenced his 1959 Seagram murals.
04 Radcliffe Camera
United Kingdom · 0.4 km from Oxford51.753° N 1.254° W
Tilman2007 · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Radcliffe Camera is the round building that everyone draws when they draw Oxford. It stands alone in the middle of Radcliffe Square, a drum of honey-coloured stone ringed by paired Corinthian columns and capped by a dome with a lantern, so that the colleges, the University Church and the Bodleian's Old Schools seem to be arranged around it. The name is simply Latin: camera means a chamber, and this was the Radcliffe room, the first circular library in England.
Did you know? The dome was begun in stone, but work stopped after more than 700 pounds had been spent and it was rebuilt in timber and lead.
05 Abbey Library of St. Gallen
Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen
Switzerland · 1.1 km from St. Gallen47.423° N 9.376° E
Elena Ternovaja · CC BY-SA 3.0 The Abbey Library of St Gallen is Switzerland's oldest library and one of the most important monastic collections in the world, and its Baroque hall is among the most beautiful rooms in Europe. Above the door a Greek inscription announces it as a "healing place of the soul". Inside, visitors shuffle across the wooden floor in obligatory felt overshoes, beneath a ceiling of pale stucco and painted scenes, between tall bookcases of carved and polished wood that curve around the hall and rise to a gallery. The mood is light and joyful: everything is cream, gold, pastel and warm brown, a Rococo celebration of learning.
Did you know? The library also guards the Plan of St Gall, drawn by monks of Reichenau around 819–830 and regarded as the oldest surviving architectural plan in Europe.
06 State Library Victoria
Australia · 1.2 km from Melbourne37.810° S 144.965° E
Image by 12019 from Pixabay State Library Victoria is one of the grand public buildings of nineteenth-century Melbourne, and its heart is a single breathtaking room. The La Trobe Reading Room, opened in 1913, sits under a dome 34.75 metres wide and just as high, with an oculus almost five metres across letting daylight fall onto desks for some 320 readers. When finished it was the largest dome of its kind in the world, overtaken within months by Centennial Hall in Wrocław. The shelves around the room hold some 32,000 books, and the light from above gives the space its calm, even glow.
Did you know? When the library opened, anyone over fourteen could use it free of charge, on one condition: their hands had to be clean.
07 Library of Parliament (Ottawa)
Library of Parliament
Canada · 0.8 km from Ottawa45.426° N 75.700° W
Image by Pet_orient from Pixabay The round, many-buttressed building tucked behind the Centre Block on Parliament Hill is the one part of Canada's original parliament that survived the fire of 1916 — and it survived because of a closed door. When flames swept through the Centre Block, the library clerk Michael MacCormac shut the library's iron doors, and the fire never reached the books. The rest of the complex had to be rebuilt; the library, apart from later repairs, is still the building the Victorians made.
Did you know? Its wrought-iron dome was prefabricated in Manchester by Thomas Fairbairn Engineering, the first state-of-the-art wrought-iron roof in North America.
08 Antiquarium (Munich Residenz)
Antiquarium
Germany · 1.1 km from Munich48.141° N 11.579° E
Wilfredor · CC0 The Antiquarium in the Munich Residenz is a single barrel-vaulted hall 66 metres long, and it is often called the largest and most lavish Renaissance interior north of the Alps. It was built between 1568 and 1571 for Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria, a passionate collector who wanted a worthy setting for his collection of ancient sculpture. The plan was developed by the court architect Wilhelm Egckl on ideas of the Mantuan antiquarian and art dealer Jacopo Strada: a two-storey building with the marble busts and statues on the ground floor and the ducal library above — hence the name, a house for antiquities.
Did you know? To stock the hall, Albrecht V sent Jacopo Strada to Venice, where in 1568 he bought Andrea Loredan's famed collection after a lawsuit and intervention by the Venetian government.
09 Thomas Jefferson Building
United States · 1.5 km from Washington38.889° N 77.006° W
NPS/Tom Engberg · Public domain The oldest of the Library of Congress buildings is also one of the most lavish interiors in the United States — a Gilded Age declaration that a young republic could house its knowledge as grandly as any European court. John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz won the design competition in 1873, but years of delay followed; Edward Pearce Casey took over as architect in 1892, with the engineer Bernard Green running the works. Built between 1890 and 1897 in a Beaux-Arts and Classical Revival manner, it opened to the public on 1 November 1897, facing the Capitol across First Street. Originally simply the Library of Congress Building, it was renamed for Thomas Jefferson in 1980 in honour of the president whose own books had once formed the core of the collection.
Did you know? An underground book tunnel once linked the library to the Capitol, with an electric conveyor carrying volumes at about 180 metres a minute.
10 Strahov Monastery Library
Strahovský klášter
Czech Republic · 2.4 km from Prague50.086° N 14.389° E
Barnos · CC BY-SA 4.0 High on the hill behind Prague Castle, the Premonstratensian canons have kept their monastery at Strahov since 1143, when it was founded by Duke Vladislaus II and Bishop Jindřich Zdík after a first attempt three years earlier had failed. The abbey has lived through a great deal since — it was attacked in the Hussite wars in 1420, received the relics of St Norbert, the founder of the order, in 1627, and was seized by the communist regime in 1950 before returning to the canons after 1989. But what brings most people up the hill is its library, one of the most beautiful and best preserved in the world.
Did you know? The library's greatest treasure is the Strahov Gospels, a manuscript made at Tours around 860 to 865, later bound with four Romanesque enamel discs from about 1180.
11 Chicago Cultural Center
United States · 4.1 km from Chicago41.884° N 87.625° W
Image by hnguyenvu from Pixabay Behind a restrained limestone front on Washington Street in the Chicago Loop hides one of the most lavish interiors in the United States. The Chicago Cultural Center opened in 1897 as the city's first central public library and, in the same building, a memorial hall for the Grand Army of the Republic, the association of Union veterans of the Civil War. The Boston firm Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge designed it in a Beaux-Arts manner with Italian Renaissance details, giving the two halves separate entrances and even different numbers of floors, as if two buildings had been fitted into one block.
Did you know? The Tiffany dome over Preston Bradley Hall is made of some 30,000 pieces of glass, set with turtleback jewels produced by Indiana's Kokomo Opalescent Glass Works.
12 Sainte-Geneviève Library
Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève
France · 1.3 km from Paris48.847° N 2.346° E
Marie-Lan Nguyen · CC BY 2.0 fr The reading room of the Sainte-Geneviève Library is one long, airy hall carried on iron. A row of sixteen slender cast-iron Ionic columns runs down its middle, dividing it into twin aisles, and from them spring openwork iron arches that hold up two barrel vaults. Large windows along the walls fill the space with daylight. Completed in 1850 and opened in February 1851, it showed its iron structure openly instead of hiding it, and is regarded as a major step towards modern architecture.
Did you know? Marcel Duchamp took a job in the library's book reserve in 1913, the year after he largely stepped back from painting.
13 George Peabody Library
United States · 1.8 km from Baltimore39.297° N 76.615° W
Matthew Petroff · CC BY-SA 3.0 From the street, the Peabody Institute on Mount Vernon Place looks like a sober Baltimore civic building. Step into the stack room and the scale inverts: a tall, narrow atrium rises 61 feet to a latticed skylight of frosted glass, and the walls on every side are five tiers of black cast-iron balconies, their railings and brackets worked into ornament, lined floor to ceiling with leather spines. It is one of the rooms that people have in mind when they call a library a cathedral of books, and it earns the phrase without any stained glass at all — the light falls straight down through the roof onto a checkerboard marble floor.
Did you know? The phrase cathedral of books is credited to the institute's provost Nathaniel H. Morison, who helped shape the building's design.
14 Admont Abbey
Stift Admont
Austria47.575° N 14.462° E
Image by brandldesign from Pixabay Admont Abbey, in the Enns valley of Styria at the gateway to the Gesäuse mountains, is the oldest surviving monastery in the province, founded in 1074 by Archbishop Gebhard of Salzburg, and a Benedictine community still lives here. But it is known across the world for one room: its library hall, the largest monastic library in the world, which earlier admirers did not hesitate to call the eighth wonder of the world.
Did you know? Forty-eight windows light the library hall so effectively that no artificial lighting has ever been installed there.
15 Tianjin Binhai Library
People's Republic of China · 25.4 km from Lunan39.016° N 117.681° E
Muzzleflash · CC0 Inside a white, ribbed box on the edge of a new cultural district, a luminous sphere sits in an eye-shaped opening, and around it bookshelves rise in curving terraces from floor to ceiling like the contour lines of a landscape. The Tianjin Binhai Library, nicknamed "The Eye", opened in October 2017 in Tianjin's Binhai New Area and immediately became one of the most photographed interiors in China: in its first week, around 10,000 people a day queued to get in.
Did you know? The building was designed to hold up to 1.2 million books, and beneath it lies an underground level for book storage and archives.
16 Central Library of UNAM, Mexico City
Biblioteca Central
Mexico · 13.5 km from Mexico City19.333° N 99.187° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Image by Pexels from Pixabay The Central Library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico is a plain ten-storey block that became one of the best-known images of modern Mexico because of what covers it. On all four sides, its windowless book tower is wrapped in a single mural of about 4,000 square metres, Historical Representation of Culture, designed by the painter and architect Juan O'Gorman. It is made not of paint but of small pieces of coloured stone gathered from different parts of Mexico, so that the colours are those of the rock itself and do not fade in the sun; only for the blues, which no stone gave him to his satisfaction, did O'Gorman turn to coloured glass.
Did you know? Seen head-on, the building hides a face of the rain god Tláloc: two circles in the mural form his eyes and the entrance doors his mouth.
17 Biblioteca Joanina
Portugal · 1.1 km from Coimbra40.207° N 8.427° W
Chris · CC BY-SA 2.0 High on the hill of Coimbra, in the old courtyard of the university known as the Paço das Escolas, stands one of the most opulent library interiors in Europe. The Biblioteca Joanina takes its name from King John V of Portugal, who began it in 1717; it was finished in 1728, and the design is credited to João Carvalho Ferreira. A portrait of the king painted by Domenico Duprà in 1725 presides over the rooms, a reminder of who paid for all this splendour.
Did you know? The library was raised over the old prison of the royal palace, which is why a former student jail lies beneath its gilded rooms.
18 Biblioteca Palafoxiana
Mexico · 1.2 km from Puebla City19.043° N 98.199° W
ProtoplasmaKid · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Biblioteca Palafoxiana in Puebla is a single long vaulted hall lined from floor to ceiling with three tiers of carved wooden bookcases, holding tens of thousands of old volumes in their original setting. Founded in 1646, it is regarded as the first public library in the Americas, and in 2005 UNESCO entered it in its Memory of the World Register.
Did you know? The library holds more than 45,000 old books, over 5,000 manuscripts and about 2,000 loose printed sheets, in some 14 languages including Hebrew, Arabic and Chaldean.
19 Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading
Real Gabinete Português de Leitura
Brazil · 3.1 km from Rio de Janeiro22.905° S 43.182° W
Stegop · CC BY-SA 4.0 Behind a carved stone façade on a narrow street in central Rio de Janeiro lies one of the most spectacular reading rooms in the world. The Real Gabinete Português de Leitura – the Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading – opens into a tall hall walled entirely with dark wooden bookcases, rising through galleries towards a skylight held in an iron frame. A great chandelier hangs in the middle, and the light filtering from above falls on tens of thousands of leather spines, turning the whole room into something between a chapel and a treasure chest.
Did you know? The first five formal sessions of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, presided over by Machado de Assis, were held in this building.
20 John Rylands Library
United Kingdom · 0.6 km from Manchester53.480° N 2.249° W
Stephen Richards · CC BY-SA 2.0 In the middle of Manchester's busy Deansgate, the John Rylands Library looks less like a Victorian library than a cathedral of books: a dark red sandstone building bristling with pinnacles, tracery and turrets, and inside it a long vaulted reading room lit by tall windows. It was conceived by Enriqueta Augustina Rylands as a memorial to her husband, John Rylands, a Manchester textile manufacturer. She bought the site in 1889, construction ran from 1890 to 1899, the building was inaugurated on 6 October 1899 and it opened to readers on 1 January 1900.
Did you know? Enriqueta Rylands paid about £210,000 for the Spencer collection in 1892, and a further £155,000 for the Crawford manuscripts in 1901.
21 Duchess Anna Amalia Library
Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek
Germany · 18.2 km from Jena50.979° N 11.332° E
FrDr · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Rococo Hall of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library is one of the great library interiors of Europe: an oval of wooden pillars and bookcases rising through three storeys, with two galleries of books above the floor and a painted ceiling at the top. It was created in the 1760s by the court architect August Friedrich Straßburger, who gutted an older building and inserted a continuous timber structure into a floor area of only about 21 by 11 metres. Twelve pillars carry the oval and the first gallery, and a walkway around them gives access to the shelves from every side. A colossal bust of Goethe by Pierre-Jean David d'Angers stands in the library.
Did you know? Among manuscripts that happened to be outside the building on the night of the fire was a previously unknown 1713 aria by Johann Sebastian Bach, announced in 2005.
22 The Morgan Library & Museum
United States · 3.3 km from New York City40.749° N 73.982° W
Photograph by Mike Peel ( www.mikepeel.net ). · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Morgan began as one man's private study and is still, at its heart, a building made for holding precious paper. J. Pierpont Morgan, the most powerful banker of his age, commissioned Charles McKim of McKim, Mead & White to house his books and manuscripts on Madison Avenue, and the library was built between 1902 and 1906. McKim gave it the look of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, low and severe, in pinkish-grey Tennessee marble. The blocks were cut so precisely that they were laid almost without mortar – a costly refinement that added around $50,000 to the bill and gives the walls their seamless, monolithic calm.
Did you know? During the Panic of 1907, Morgan locked the heads of New York's banks and trust companies in the library overnight until they agreed a rescue plan.
23 Janggyeon Panjeon of Haeinsa
South Korea35.802° N 128.099° E
Bernard Gagnon · CC0 High on the slopes of Mount Gaya, at the top of the Haeinsa temple compound, four plain wooden halls guard one of the great treasures of East Asian Buddhism: the Tripitaka Koreana, more than 81,000 carved wooden printing blocks bearing the Buddhist canon in Classical Chinese. The halls of the Janggyeong Panjeon are deliberately unadorned. Their marvel lies in how they work: for more than five centuries they have kept the blocks free of rot, warping and insects with nothing but careful siting, moving air and earth.
Did you know? In September 1951 the air force colonel Kim Young-hwan refused an order to bomb the temple during an anti-guerrilla campaign, and his memorial tablet is now kept inside the halls.
24 Old Library, Trinity College Dublin
The Old Library
Ireland · 0.3 km from Dublin53.344° N 6.257° W
Diliff · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Old Library of Trinity College Dublin was built between 1712 and 1732 to designs by Thomas Burgh, surveyor-general of Ireland, and it still sits among the university's squares in the middle of the city. From outside it is a long, sober block, its lower storey in calp limestone quarried at Palmerstown and the upper floors in grey granite from Ballyknockan. Inside, on the first floor, is the Long Room: some 65 metres of oak bookcases, gallery and marble, one of the handful of library interiors in the world that people travel specifically to stand in.
Did you know? The Book of Kells has belonged to Trinity since 1661, and only one of its volumes is shown at a time.
25 New York Public Library Main Branch
United States · 3.7 km from New York City40.753° N 73.982° W
ajay_suresh · CC BY 2.0 The main building of the New York Public Library, officially the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building since 2008, occupies the stretch of Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets in Midtown Manhattan. It was designed by the firm of Carrère and Hastings in the Beaux-Arts manner, clad in white Vermont marble, and opened on 23 May 1911 after more than a decade of work; the cornerstone had been laid in November 1902. The site itself has a past: the library stands where the Croton reservoir once held Manhattan's water supply, and Bryant Park opens directly behind it.
Did you know? The lions were first nicknamed Leo Astor and Leo Lenox; Mayor Fiorello La Guardia renamed them Patience and Fortitude during the Great Depression.
26 Boston Public Library, McKim Building
United States · 2 km from Boston42.349° N 71.079° W
Image by MonicaVolpin from Pixabay Above the main doors of the Boston Public Library's original building on Copley Square, three words are cut into the granite: "Free to All". The McKim Building, opened in 1895, was conceived as a palace for the public, and it remains one of the finest Renaissance Revival interiors in the United States.
Did you know? A row of historical names carved on the facade was removed during construction after critics spotted that their initials spelled out the architects' firm, McKim, Mead, White.
27 State Hall of the Austrian National Library
Prunksaal der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek
Austria · 0.5 km from Vienna48.206° N 16.367° E
Richard Hopkins · CC BY 2.0 The State Hall, or Prunksaal, is the ceremonial heart of the old imperial court library in Vienna's Hofburg, and one of the grandest library interiors ever built. Almost 80 metres long and 20 metres high, it is lined with tall wooden bookcases holding some 200,000 volumes, while the centre of the hall swells upward into an oval dome painted with a sky full of figures. Walking in from Josefsplatz, the first impression is of colour and gold rather than of books: the warm brown of old leather bindings, marble, gilded carvings and frescoes merging into one Baroque whole.
Did you know? Prince Eugene of Savoy's 15,000 books are colour-coded in morocco leather: blue for theology and law, yellow for natural sciences, red for history and literature.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the most beautiful library in the world?
- On our list, Clementinum (Czech Republic) ranks first, followed by Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (United States) and Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Italy).
- Which country has the most beautiful libraries?
- In our collection, the most come from the United States (7), Austria (2) and the Czech Republic (2).
- What is the largest monastery library in the world?
- The library of Admont Abbey in Styria, Austria, is the largest monastery library in the world. Its Baroque hall was completed in the 18th century.
- Where is the Book of Kells kept?
- The Book of Kells is kept at Trinity College Dublin, in the Old Library building that also houses the Long Room.
- How many libraries are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 27 libraries in 16 countries. The United States has the most, with 7.