The library is an ordinary, and at the same time, an amazing place in which books live. Sometimes, we do not realize how much interesting things are connected with them.
I suggest you look at interesting photos, read interesting facts about libraries and books.
Livraria Lello bookstore in Porto (Portugal) - one of the most spectacular bookstores in the world. The shop building is an architectural monument with almost a century of history. The books are framed in neo-Gothic shelves with carved figures of literary characters.
Bookstore in Portugal
Libreria El Ateneo Grand Splendid is a bookstore in Buenos Aires (Argentina), which is not only included in the list of the largest in the world, but is also considered one of the most beautiful. The store is located in a theater building built in the early twentieth century and has completely preserved the original theatrical setting, supplementing it with books.
Bookstore in Buenos Aires (Argentina)
Abdul Kassim Ismail - the Grand Vizier of Persia (10th century) was always next to his library. If he went somewhere, the library "followed" him. 117 thousand book volumes were transported by four hundred camels. Moreover, books (i.e. camels) were arranged in alphabetical order.
Portable Library of Abdul Kassim Ismail
In public In the libraries of medieval Europe, books were chained to the shelves. Such chains were long enough to remove the book from the shelf and read, but did not allow the book to be taken out of the library. This practice continued until the 18th century., which was due to the great value of each copy of the book.
The largest publication in the world is the 1112-volume edition of the British Parliamentary Papers. , published by the Irish University Press in 1968-1972. The complete edition weighs 3.3 tons, costs £50,000. Art. To read the full edition, you need to spend 6 years even if you read 10 hours a day.
The heaviest book in the world is considered to be a geographical atlas stored in the British Museum in London. Atlas is over one meter high and weighs 320 kilograms.
The longest biography in the history of printing
is the life story of the British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill. It was written by Churchill's son Randolph and Martin Gilbert. There are 22 thick volumes in this book.
Slovak artist Matej Kren
created an unusual installation - a book fortress. Outwardly, the installation resembles a small fortress, but its The 8-meter walls are not made of bricks, but of books.
To one of the libraries in the Finnish city of Vantaa discreetly returned the book, handed out over 100 years ago. According to the librarian, they were never able to find out who brought the book to the library. However, judging by the notes on the inside cover, the book was last officially issued in early twentieth century.
And some more interesting photos. Look!
library rack made of books
Wood bookends
An interesting invention for book lovers
creative bookshelf
Unusual bookshelves
Creative bed in the form of a book
One of the projects of the Novosibirsk Regional Scientific Library
was presented in the form of a stack of books
The library for many is the temple of the book. It is this place that is a special repository for many scientific and popular works of printed art.
We present to you interesting facts about libraries. It is no secret that the first libraries were created at the temples of religions. And then there were libraries - repository of manuscripts, and only after the dream of a book and printing came true, did the first libraries appear in the form familiar to us.
I wonder how many volumes are in the largest edition? Many think that this is several hundred, but it turns out that the largest number of volumes is 1112, and all of them are included in the parliamentary documents of Britain. And it weighs over three tons.
Many superstitions give rise to various rumors about libraries. There are myths and stories about ghost settlements in various historical libraries. After all, they are over a thousand years old. But there is also the expression "typos of the devil." This saying appeared in the periods when the whole history of writing books was in the churches.
And when the divine books were published, all the hated misprints appeared. Since this was considered unacceptable, their presence could not be attributed to the human factor, and the only justification could be the manifestation of the devil.
More interesting facts about libraries. Hungarian Joseph Tari, for example, has created a collection of books that are no more than 76 millimeters long. Such miniature books were made to order and were very rare. However, they could flip through the pages and see the texts of the book.
Often the books are biographies. And the longest and most voluminous of them is the life story of Sir Winston Churchill. It occupies more than 22 volumes of books.
Many historical libraries have been in existence for hundreds of years. And the value of some copies of such books is highly valued. For their safety, all the books were secured with a chain so that the book could not be taken out of the building.
Extracurricular activities
Literature
It is impossible to imagine the development of world culture and science without libraries. This enchanting and magical world of knowledge contained in folios attracts everyone: both adults and children. For the International Day of School Libraries, we have prepared a material in which we will present interesting facts about these places of wisdom around the world.We have a new format! You can now listen to the article.
Since 1999, the International Day of School Libraries has been celebrated every fourth Monday in October. Too bad it's only one day! We would love to remember libraries and their secrets, books and riddles much more often.
“Girl, can you tell me how to get to the library?” - this wonderful phrase from Gaidai's comedy "Operation Y" is almost never heard now. Who will get acquainted like this when even the famous Lenin Library digitizes hundreds of thousands of its treasures a year! “We stopped going to libraries!” - the sad reader will exclaim. The author will agree only in part: one has only to go to the RSL (the same “Leninka”), to the State Public Historical Library - and you will be surprised at the absence of empty tables! All is not lost yet, the main thing is to continue to create magic.
The library is in everyone's imagination
Let's fast forward to the magical library that is in the mind of every person. Where she came from, what images were superimposed on a child's fantasy, is not completely known, but this is always an amazing and even a little frightening world. Silence rings in this library, and old tomes are found on dusty shelves. On the shelves, traces of the palms are visible - this is the readers once again, in the literal sense, were drawn to knowledge. And here is the school library, whose portrait also deserves an image! Huge piles of textbooks, almost child-sized. The smell of printing ink off the pages, the crunchy paper the books are wrapped in. The crunch is still bouncing off the shelves as you run your hand across the glossy surface of the cover and place your finger on Paragraph 1. You flip through neatly, quickly, even faster, until the school year ends and it's time to turn in old textbooks in order to get new ones, as in some ancient ritual...
Represented? Then we're ready to embark on a journey of facts about libraries around the world!
5 facts about libraries from around the world
Library Fact #1: The Largest Library in the Ancient World
The largest library of the Ancient World that has come down to our times is the library ... No, alas, not Alexandria, although we will return to it later. So, the primacy belongs to the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal, whose passion is quite understandable to modern book lovers - he was an avid reader and collector of texts.
This enlightened ruler of the 7th century BC. sent specially trained people to different parts of his country to make copies of all the texts that they met on their way. Going to war, Ashurbanipal always "paid attention" to the cuneiform libraries of his neighbors, in no case allowing the soldiers to damage such a treasure. The result of the ruler's passion: archaeologists have discovered about 25 thousand clay tablets with texts.
Library Fact No. 2. The largest library of our time
Since we are talking about the largest libraries, let's fast forward to the present and talk about the Library of Congress. The largest library of the 21st century is located in Washington DC, and its collections contain more than 155 million books in 470 languages. Among these books there is literature of a very different nature - from scientific works to documentation of government agencies. Moreover, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world houses manuscripts, films and audio recordings.
Fans of Russian literature will be pleased to know that the Library of Congress houses the largest collection of Russian-language books abroad. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Library of Congress purchased for $40,000 the personal library of the Krasnoyarsk merchant and bibliophile G.V. Yudin, who fled from the horrors of the Civil War.
Library Fact #3. Myths of the Library of Alexandria
We are sure that you have heard about the fire in the Library of Alexandria, which destroyed the abode of wisdom of the ancient period. It's time to consider history from a scientific point of view and ... find out that it was not the fire that caused the "scientific catastrophe" at all. Everything is much more prosaic.
So, the Library of Alexandria was indeed one of the largest in the history of mankind - according to various estimates, up to 700 thousand copies were stored in it. The myth that you most likely heard says that founded by the Egyptians in the 3rd century BC. the library was burned to the ground by haters of ancient culture - barbarians. Watch the film "Agora" if you want to plunge into a terrible romance, alas, not quite a true story. In fact, the barbarians have nothing to do with it. Yes, Plutarch does write that the books were damaged by fire in 48 AD. (then the city was taken by Caesar), but in the end it was not books that burned, but papyri. On them, according to the latest reports of historians, accounting records were kept. Not a big loss for world culture!
So what happened? The library disappeared... due to lack of funding, which has been shrinking and shrinking over the centuries. In the 3rd century AD, 6 centuries after its foundation, the emperor Caracalla liquidated scholarships for scientists who were involved in its development, forbade foreigners to work in it. Gradually, books turned into dead weight without care and interest in them and simply dilapidated, or were destroyed.
Library Fact #4. Would you like to...rewrite a book that interests you? Medieval scriptoria
In the Middle Ages, in the monasteries - the cloisters of wisdom and distributors of knowledge - there were libraries in which scriptoria worked. Scriptorium is a professional workshop for copying manuscripts. The first of them arose in the VI-VII centuries in Spain, France and Italy. At first, books, as in ancient times, were copied from dictation, and the material for writing was kept on their knees. You can imagine how “accurate” the texts were. Yes, there were no tables back then. But already in the 5th century, special tables appeared in the workshops, and the first iconographic images of calligraphers date back to this time. Gradually, the scriptoria fall into decay, but not because of a lack of funding, but because of the transfer of the occupation - the production of books - to urban artisans.
And there, Johannes Gutenberg invented printing in the 15th century, which led to the possibility of doing without manual labor and, at the same time, to an increase in the number of libraries.
Library Fact #5. Such valuable books - why chain a tome?
Another interesting fact that librarians might like. In the libraries of medieval Europe, books were chained to racks and shelves with special chains. As a result, the reader got access to the folio itself, could leaf through and read it, but take it with them - for nothing! Moreover, this practice continued until the 18th century, since individual copies were extremely valuable. Don't believe? A similar image of libraries can be found in modern films - and in "Harry Potter", and in "Game of Thrones", and in "Doctor Strange".
For the most curious, a detailed picture: a metal ring was inserted into the cover or corner (so as not to spoil the folio), to which the chain was attached. By the way, this precautionary measure led to another oddity - the books on the shelves were turned with their spines away from the visitor. This was done so that it could be easily taken and opened without getting tangled in chains.
5 More Surprising Facts About Libraries
Library Fact #6. Library Patron
Donating books to the library is a worthy occupation that is not neglected even in modern times. Even subscribers of our social networks participate in special promotions, which they do not forget to tell us about. But the content of the library requires a lot of money! Does history have worthy examples of benefactors?
Of course yes. One of the brightest was the industrialist Andrew Carnegie. More than 2,500 libraries were founded with his money, of which about 1,670 were in the USA, and the rest in England, Australia and New Zealand. This man has spent over $55 million of his fortune building and maintaining libraries, earning him the title of "Library Patron".
Library Fact #7: Transparent Repository of Antiquities
Now the term "transparency" means the honest conduct of all affairs and exemplary reporting to the audience. But this fact about the Yale University library is no less surprising.
Beinecke is a rare book library and the largest building in the world dedicated to the search and storage of rare manuscripts and documents. Currently, the library holds about 500,000 volumes of books and several million handwritten texts. Anyone who has ever worked with antique papers understands how important proper storage conditions are: excess, improper temperature and humidity can destroy history. But you can't read in the dark! Beinecke's staff solved the problem gracefully. The facade of the building is equipped with marble glasses, through which light spreads easily, but does not harm shabby documents.
Library Fact #8
Amsterdam is an amazing city. Including libraries. In 2010, a library was opened at Schiphop Airport, where books are issued to readers without a library card, deposits and dates for returning books - on parole. If you want to borrow a book, you must simply leave another one instead. Here is a library without librarians.
Library Fact #9: The Ghost Library
Where without mysticism and historical mysteries, since we are talking about libraries?
One of the most famous ghost libraries is the legendary collection of books and documents owned by Ivan the Terrible. This secret meeting even has its own name - Liberia. It is believed that the library was hidden by Ivan IV somewhere in Moscow, or was lost in historical upheavals. The search for a collection in which there is not a single rarity took several centuries and has not stopped to this day. To date, more than 50 hypotheses about Liberia are known (emphasis on the second “and”), but authoritative historians doubt its existence - most likely, the Grozny collection, if it existed, died in the fires of the Time of Troubles.
Library Fact #10 Living Libraries
How many times have we dreamed, while reading our favorite book, to communicate with the author or hero? After all, the plot clearly does not tell all the details and facets of a person ...
*The Library of Congress in Washington is by far the largest in the world. It contains about 75 million different titles, including audio and video recordings, photographs.
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If we divide all the books stored in the Moscow “public” library by all employees, we get 29,830 copies per person.
*Library employees give out about 400 bibliographic references per day.
*The collection of documents and books of Ivan the Terrible is still the most mysterious library in the world. Historians believe that it was hidden or transported to another place by Ivan IV himself. For several centuries, scientists and archaeologists from all over the world have been trying to find a priceless artifact. According to one version, the library is hidden within the walls of the Moscow Kremlin.
* Bibliocleptomania is not just a difficult to pronounce word, it is a real disease, which is characterized by an immense love for books and the desire to appropriate library copies for oneself. One of the most famous representatives of this disease is Steven Bloomberg, who stole more than 23,000 rare books from 268 libraries in different parts of the world. To compile his collection, estimated at about $ 20 million, Bloomberg used a variety of methods: ventilation system and elevator shaft.
*Abdul Kassim Ismail- the Grand Vizier of Persia (10th century) was always next to his library. If he went somewhere, the library "followed" him. 117 thousand book volumes were transported by four hundred camels. Moreover, books (i.e. camels) were arranged in alphabetical order.
* In public In the libraries of medieval Europe, books were chained to the shelves.Such chains were long enough to remove the book from the shelf and read, but did not allow the book to be taken out of the library.This practice continued until the 18th century., which was due to the great value of each copy of the book.
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To one of the libraries in the Finnish city of Vantaadiscreetly returned the book, handed out over 100 years ago.According to the librarian, they were never able to find out who brought the book to the library. However, judging by the notes on the inside cover, the book was last officially issued in early twentieth century.
We have long been accustomed to libraries. From the first school days we hear this word. "For the next lesson, read this story. You can find the book in the library." Thus begins our acquaintance with the wonderful world of libraries. For some of us, this place is a source of information, a repository of books. For others, the reading rooms of the library become a place where you can come and work, hide from the hustle and bustle, feel the warmth and comfort. And sometimes we just come there to pass the time and flip through the pages of magazines and books.
What do we know about libraries?
What does the word "library" mean?
Library (Greek: "place of storage of books") - an institution in which collected works of printing and writing for public use are stored, and reference and bibliographic work is also carried out there. Libraries are an integral part of the country and the nation, they reflect the human need for the accumulation and enhancement of knowledge, cultural and intellectual development.
What are the libraries?
Currently, there are different types of libraries: national, regional, public, special, as well as "educational" (university, institute and school).
When did the first libraries appear?
The first libraries appeared in the Ancient East. The most famous ancient oriental library is the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh: it contains a collection of cuneiform tablets from the palace of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal. One of the most famous ancient libraries is Alexandria: founded at the beginning of the 3rd century BC, in the Hellenistic world it was the center of education and science. Its funds included about 750,000 scrolls. More than one and a half thousand years ago, it was destroyed: there are many versions of how this happened. The most popular says that the library was burned during the capture of Alexandria by the Ottoman Turks. At the beginning of the 21st century, the unique book depository, which became a legend, was restored through the efforts of a number of countries. Now it is the main library of Egypt, a cultural center located on the Mediterranean coast in the city of Alexandria. The library is both a memorial to the Library of Alexandria, lost in antiquity, and a modern center of science and education.
In the monasteries in the Middle Ages, there were libraries in which scriptoria (workshops for copying manuscripts) operated. With the invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century, the number of libraries began to increase, and in modern times, with the spread of literacy, the number of library visitors also increased.
What is the largest library in the world?
One of the largest libraries in the history of mankind is Library of Congress in Washington. The library has over 75 million titles, including , photographs, recordings, musical compositions. The library opened in 1800 with a total book value of $5,000.
The largest library in Russia and the second largest library in the world (after the US Library of Congress) is Russian State Library(former Lenin Library) in Moscow. It was created on the basis of the Rumyantsev Museum. In 2008 it celebrates its 180th anniversary. The volume of the library fund exceeds 42 million items.
What is the largest electronic library in the world?
The largest digital library today is the World Digital Library. Its grand opening took place on April 21, 2009. The founder of this global project is the US Library of Congress. The participants of the international project are national book depositories and archives of various countries, including Russia. Thanks to this unique library, millions of people around the world can get free access to cultural treasures and archives from around the world in seven languages, including Russian.
The most mysterious library in history- this is the legendary library of Ivan the Terrible, a collection of books and documents, the last owner of which was supposedly Ivan IV. According to one version, it was hidden by Grozny. Searches for the library have been going on for several centuries, but it has not yet been found. There is an assumption that the library is immured in the dungeons of the Kremlin.
The highest library- a space library on board the orbital complex "Mir", which has more than a hundred books - from the works of K. E. Tsiolkovsky to the novels of I. Ilf and E. Petrov.
And you know that...
one of oldest printed books, which have survived to this day, after restoration, is put on public display in the British Library in London. The so-called "Diamond Sutra", containing a sacred Buddhist text, was created in May 868 by a certain Wong Zei.
Abdul Kassim Ismail - the great vizier of Persia (10th century) was always near his library. If he went somewhere, the library "followed" him. 117 thousand book volumes were transported by four hundred camels. Moreover, books (i.e. camels) were arranged in alphabetical order.
