Whether a paneled monastery library, the reading room of a venerable university, a famous private library, or a personal home library reflecting one's own biography – book collections and libraries are places of well-being, oases of tranquility, and at the same time overflowing with ideas, possibilities, histories, alternative lifestyles, and undiscovered treasures. They offer space for focused work, modern humanities, and analytical thinking, yet are also places of contemplation, dreaming, and remembrance.

On this photographic expedition, Massimo Listri visits some of the world's oldest and most beautiful libraries to reveal their architectural, historical, and imaginative wonders. Through grand wooden doors, up spiral staircases, and along exquisite, shelf-lined corridors, he guides us through outstanding private, public, educational, and monastic libraries dating back to 766. These institutions, spanning the Middle Ages, Classicism, Baroque, Rococo, and 19th centuries, house some of the most precious records of human thought and action, written and printed in manuscripts, volumes, papyrus scrolls, and incunabula. In each of these libraries, Listri's evocative images capture the library's unique atmosphere as well as its most valuable holdings and design details.

The libraries featured include the papal collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library and Trinity College Library in Dublin, home to the Book of Kells and the Book of Durrow . The meticulous descriptions accompanying each library not only highlight their remarkable holdings—some of which are illustrated—but also their often eventful, turbulent, or controversial past. One example is the Franciscan monastery in Lima, Peru, with its wealth of archived Inquisition documents.

Following our XXL bestseller, this more compact edition is now available: a feast for the eyes for book lovers, an ode to reading and written culture, and a cultural-historical pilgrimage to the sites that are the archive and ark of our history.