Beautiful libraries around the world

The Codrington Library, All Souls College, Oxford. It is an academic library, endowed by Christopher Codrington (1668–1710), a Fellow of the college who amassed his fortune through plantation slavery. It was completed in 1751 and has been in continuous use by scholars since then. The modern collection comprises some 185,000 items, about a third of which were produced before 1800. The library's collections are particularly strong in Law, European History, Ecclesiastical History, Military History, and Classics.

The Escorial Library, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain. The library’s collection consists of more than 40,000 volumes and many important illuminated manuscripts. 

Admont Abbey Library, Austria. It is the largest monastery library in the world. It contains c. 70,000 volumes of the monastery's entire holdings of c. 200,000 volumes.

The Tripitaka Koreana, Haeinsa Temple, South Korea. It houses a Korean collection of the Tripitaka (Buddhist scriptures, and the Sanskrit word for "three baskets"), carved onto 81,258 wooden printing blocks in the 13th century. It is the world's most comprehensive and oldest intact version of Buddhist canon in Hanja script.

Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, Paris, France. It is a public and university library in Paris, which inherited the collection of the Abbey of St Genevieve. The library contains around 2 million documents.

Biblioteca Joanina, Coimbra, Portugal. It is the Baroque library of the University of Coimbra, built in the 18th century, and it contains about 250 thousand volumes, namely works of medicine, geography, history, humanistic studies, science, civil and canon law, philosophy and theology.

Images by Will Pryce through The Telegraph

Text source: Wikipedia

(written by FK for Walkley Library)