The treasure-house of books
The great role of books in the life of people can't be denied. Thanks to books we have the possibility to give knowledge to the next generations, study the subject we are interested in, enjoy the world created by books, etc.
Books need careful treatment; they should be kept and respected. And to keep them carefully, libraries were created all over the world. The rarest and the most precious books were collected in libraries.
People felt the necessity to create libraries long time ago, that is why a great number of libraries were built to gather books from all over the world. The smartest people were librarians there, thousands of people spent days rewriting books there.
Some libraries were damaged and books were burnt, a lot of rare books written by ancient philosophers were damaged and in such way the whole epoch was also damaged.
The Royal Library of Alexandria is known all over the world as it had the richest collection of books and almost all of them were burnt in the fire. Till nowadays scientists don't know exactly how and when this library was destroyed. But legends about its books are popular till nowadays.
The most popular libraries nowadays are:
- The Medicea Laurenziana library. Almost 11 thousand chosen by the beauty of the cover books are kept in the building of the 16th century. This library is also a centre of protection and investigation of ancient manuscripts and rare books.
- The Anna Amalia Library is situated in Germany. The fire on September 2, 2004 damaged 50 000 ancient manuscripts and 62 000 books seriously suffered from the flame. These were ancient books published till 1850. The major part of books of the library suffered a lot. The building of the library was rebuilt and according to architectures it must be opened in 2008.
- The National Library of Austria can boast a rich collection of rare books. It was built in the beginning of the 18th century. It was built by the most famous architectures of that time. One of the most famous elements of this library is the sculpture of Heracles. This wonderful building created in baroque style keeps more than 200 thousand books of 16th – 19th centuries. The British Museum Library is the most famous all over the world. In December, 2000 the Queen of Great Britain Elizabeth 2 inaugurated the Great Court. 100 millions pounds were spent on its building. The base of the Great Court is a beautiful reading-room. This library keeps 25 000 published books of the world's culture. In the middle of 19th century the reading-room was proclaimed the most valuable sight of London.
- The Quincie Douglas Library. This library keeps more than 60 thousands books, including press, manuscripts, computer resources. This library uses all modern technologies that allow faster and more comfortable search of books.
Libraries were considered to be saint places, to which only several people had access. Most of people thought it was the place of magic and mysteries and most of them were afraid to enter it. Maybe this myth was created by librarians to save books from unnecessary troubles.