The World's Most Beautiful Libraries

The World's Most Beautiful Libraries PDF

Author:

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Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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From the mighty halls of ancient Alexandria to the coffered ceilings of the Morgan Library in New York, human beings have had a long, enraptured relationship with libraries. Like no other concept and like no other space, the collection of knowledge, learning, and imagination offers a sense of infinite possibility. It's the unrivalled realm of discovery, where every faded manuscript or mighty clothbound tome might reveal a provocative new idea, a far-flung fantasy, an ancient belief, a religious conviction, or a whole new way of being in the world. In this new photographic journey, Massimo Listri travels to some of the oldest and finest libraries to reveal their architectural, historical, and imaginative wonder. Through great wooden doors, up spiralling staircases, and along exquisite, shelf-lined corridors, he leads us through outstanding private, public, educational, and monastic libraries, dating as far back as 766. Between them, these medieval, classical, baroque, rococo, and 19th-century institutions hold some of the most precious records of human thought and deed, inscribed and printed in manuscripts, volumes, papyrus scrolls, and incunabula. In each, Listri's poised images capture the library's unique atmosphere, as much as their most prized holdings and design details. Featured libraries include the papal collections of the Vatican Apostolic Library and the Trinity College Library, home to the Book of Kells and Book of Durrow. With meticulous descriptions accompanying each featured library, we learn not only of the libraries astonishing holdings from which highlights are illustrated but also of their often lively, turbulent, or controversial pasts. Like the Franciscan monastery in Lima, Peru, with its horde of archival Inquisition documents. At once a bibliophile beauty pageant, an ode to knowledge, and an evocation of the particular magic of print, Massimo Listri. The World's Most Beautiful Libraries is above all a cultural-historical pilgrimage to the heart of our halls of learning, to the stories they tell, as much as those they gather in printed matter along polished shelves.

The Most Beautiful Libraries of the World

The Most Beautiful Libraries of the World PDF

Author: Guillaume de Laubier

Publisher:

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780500511558

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From El Escorial in Spain to the Congress in Washington, from Trinity College, Cambridge to the Abbey of Saint-Gall, this volume reveals an exceptional heritage: nearly 20 shrines to culture, entirely devoted to the presentation of knowledge, stacked with writings and shrouded in silence."

Temples of Books

Temples of Books PDF

Author: gestalten

Publisher: Gestalten

Published: 2022-03-29

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9783967040241

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In 2016, the world's oldest existing library reopened in Fes, Morocco. It opened for the first time in the 9th Century. These shrines to the written word date back even further, and continue to be built today. They're a place where some of the oldest written texts are preserved and some of the newest technology connects visitors with vast amounts of knowledge. Libraries are changing, but, as places that are fundamentally free and open to all, they're also staying the same. Libraries of the World explores the most stunning examples, but it also explores how varied the idea of a library can be. It can be a grand Baroque hall with leather-bound tomes or a mid-century masterpiece, but it can just as easily be a few shelves in a repurposed phone booth.

The Library

The Library PDF

Author: James W. P. Campbell

Publisher:

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780500342886

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This spectacular book is the first single volume to tell the story of the library as a distinct building type, all around the world. Throughout the ages, book collections have served to symbolize their owners culture and learning, and the wealthy and powerful have spent lavishly on buildings to house them. In its highest form the library became a total work of art, combining painting, sculpture, furniture and architecture into seamless, dramatic spaces. The finest libraries are repositories not just of books, but of learning, creativity and contemplation; they embody some of the highest achievements of humankind. This book recounts that history in text and images of truly outstanding quality.

Girl on Girl

Girl on Girl PDF

Author: Charlotte Jansen

Publisher: Laurence King Publishing

Published: 2019-11-05

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781786275554

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Girl on Girl looks at how women are using photography, the internet and the female gaze to explore self–image and female identity in contemporary art. A new generation of women is taking the art world – online and offline – by storm. In an image–obsessed culture saturated with social media, these 40 artists are using photography and the female gaze to redefine the fields of fashion, art, advertising and photojournalism, making a profound impact on our visual world. Forty artists are featured, all of whose principal subject matter is either themselves or other women. Each is accompanied by a short profile based on personal interviews with the author, giving a fascinating insight into this exciting shift in female creativity. "Charlotte Jansen has brought together some of the finest female photographers of our generation" – Refinery29 "A very important book" – Vogue Italia "Young female artists are using photography and social media to explore issues of female identity. This gorgeous book introduces 40 of them, in an investigation of photography and the female gaze."– Eva Wiseman, Observer Magazine Features work by Aneta Bartos Tonje Bøe Birkeland Nakeya Brown Juno Calypso Anja Carr Amanda Charchian Petra Collins Maisie Cousins Nathalie Daoust Shae DeTar Lalla Essaydi Maya Fuhr Yaeli Gabriely Petrina Hicks Ayana V. Jackson Lebohang Kganye Lilia Li–Mi–Yan Pixy Liao Alexandra Marzella Rania Matar Izumi Miyazaki Monika Mogi Zanele Muholi Mihaela Noroc Birthe Piontek Elizabeth Renstrom Marianna Rothen Phebe Schmidt Leah Schrager Molly Soda Johanna Stickland Iiu Susiraja Deanna Templeton Yvonne Todd Mayan Toledano Jaimie Warren Isabelle Wenzel Aviya Wyse Jessica Yatrofsky Pinar Yolaçan

The Country House Library

The Country House Library PDF

Author: Mark Purcell

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 0300248687

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Beginning with new evidence that cites the presence of books in Roman villas and concluding with present day vicissitudes of collecting, this generously illustrated book presents a complete survey of British and Irish country house libraries. Replete with engaging anecdotes about owners and librarians, the book features fascinating information on acquisition bordering on obsession, the process of designing library architecture, and the care (and neglect) of collections. The author also disputes the notion that these libraries were merely for show, arguing that many of them were profoundly scholarly, assembled with meticulous care, and frequently used for intellectual pursuits. For those who love books and the libraries in which they are collected and stored, The Country House Library is an essential volume to own.

Ancient Libraries

Ancient Libraries PDF

Author: Jason König

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-04-25

Total Pages: 501

ISBN-13: 1107244587

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The circulation of books was the motor of classical civilization. However, books were both expensive and rare, and so libraries - private and public, royal and civic - played key roles in articulating intellectual life. This collection, written by an international team of scholars, presents a fundamental reassessment of how ancient libraries came into being, how they were organized and how they were used. Drawing on papyrology and archaeology, and on accounts written by those who read and wrote in them, it presents new research on reading cultures, on book collecting and on the origins of monumental library buildings. Many of the traditional stories told about ancient libraries are challenged. Few were really enormous, none were designed as research centres, and occasional conflagrations do not explain the loss of most ancient texts. But the central place of libraries in Greco-Roman culture emerges more clearly than ever.

The Knowledge

The Knowledge PDF

Author: Lewis Dartnell

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0143127047

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How would you go about rebuilding a technological society from scratch? If our technological society collapsed tomorrow what would be the one book you would want to press into the hands of the postapocalyptic survivors? What crucial knowledge would they need to survive in the immediate aftermath and to rebuild civilization as quickly as possible? Human knowledge is collective, distributed across the population. It has built on itself for centuries, becoming vast and increasingly specialized. Most of us are ignorant about the fundamental principles of the civilization that supports us, happily utilizing the latest—or even the most basic—technology without having the slightest idea of why it works or how it came to be. If you had to go back to absolute basics, like some sort of postcataclysmic Robinson Crusoe, would you know how to re-create an internal combustion engine, put together a microscope, get metals out of rock, or even how to produce food for yourself? Lewis Dartnell proposes that the key to preserving civilization in an apocalyptic scenario is to provide a quickstart guide, adapted to cataclysmic circumstances. The Knowledge describes many of the modern technologies we employ, but first it explains the fundamentals upon which they are built. Every piece of technology rests on an enormous support network of other technologies, all interlinked and mutually dependent. You can’t hope to build a radio, for example, without understanding how to acquire the raw materials it requires, as well as generate the electricity needed to run it. But Dartnell doesn’t just provide specific information for starting over; he also reveals the greatest invention of them all—the phenomenal knowledge-generating machine that is the scientific method itself. The Knowledge is a brilliantly original guide to the fundamentals of science and how it built our modern world.

The Last Great Road Bum

The Last Great Road Bum PDF

Author: Héctor Tobar

Publisher: MCD

Published: 2020-08-25

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 0374720401

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One of the Los Angeles Times Top 10 California Books of 2020. One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 Fiction Books from 2020. Longlisted for the Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Joyce Carol Oates prize. One of Exile in Bookville’s Favorite Books of 2020. In The Last Great Road Bum, Héctor Tobar turns the peripatetic true story of a naive son of Urbana, Illinois, who died fighting with guerrillas in El Salvador into the great American novel for our times. Joe Sanderson died in pursuit of a life worth writing about. He was, in his words, a “road bum,” an adventurer and a storyteller, belonging to no place, people, or set of ideas. He was born into a childhood of middle-class contentment in Urbana, Illinois and died fighting with guerillas in Central America. With these facts, acclaimed novelist and journalist Héctor Tobar set out to write what would become The Last Great Road Bum. A decade ago, Tobar came into possession of the personal writings of the late Joe Sanderson, which chart Sanderson’s freewheeling course across the known world, from Illinois to Jamaica, to Vietnam, to Nigeria, to El Salvador—a life determinedly an adventure, ending in unlikely, anonymous heroism. The Last Great Road Bum is the great American novel Joe Sanderson never could have written, but did truly live—a fascinating, timely hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that only a master of both like Héctor Tobar could pull off.

Libraries

Libraries PDF

Author:

Publisher:

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 9780500543146

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"This volume contains Höfer's famously ascetic images of the British Library in London, the Escorial in Spain, the Whitney Museum and the Pierpoint Library in New York, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Villa Medici in Rome and the Hamburg University Library, among others".--BOOKJACKET.