Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Travel Writers Conjure Up Magical Libraries

Boston Copley Public Library. Boston, MA.

Travel writers and adventurers Michelle Enemark and Dylan Thuras have assembled a gorgeous gallery of photographs depicting the world's most magnificent libraries on their website, Curious Expeditions. The pictures are from a wide variety of sources, including reader contributions, and selections show that glorious groves of books are in full bloom worldwide. The gallery, Librophiliac Love Letter, proclaims: "Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library."

Book Patrol has added a few quotations to enhance your viewing pleasure. Some lyrics to accompany what Goethe called the "frozen music" of architecture.


Library of Parliment. Ottawa, Canada.
"This building is like a book. Its architecture is the binding, its text is in the glass and sculpture."


Real Gabinete Portugues De Leitura. Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
"Architecture has recorded the great ideas of the human race. Not only every religious symbol, but every human thought has its page in that vast book."
Victor Hugo.


Russian National Library. St. Petersburg, Russia.
"Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music, or pictures, or architecture, or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."
Samuel Butler.


Biblioteca Palafoxiana. Puebal, Mexico.
"All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!"
T.E. Lawrence.


Handelingenkamer Tweede Kamer Der Staten-Generaal Den Haag. The Hague, Netherlands.
"The building of the architecture of a novel--the craft of it--is something I never tire of."
John Irving.


Duke Of Humphrey's Library, Bodelian. Oxford University, England.
"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before."
Audre Lorde.

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