Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries
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Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries
Temples of Knowledge
Exceptional access to the world’s illustrious libraries
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 spiraling 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, Trinity College Library, home to the Book of Kells and Book of Durrow, and the holdings of the Laurentian Library in Florence, the private library of the powerful House of Medici, designed by Michelangelo. 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 Altenburg Abbey in Austria, an outpost of imperial Catholicism repeatedly destroyed during the European wars of religion, or 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 photographer
Massimo Listri, a Florence native, is a photographer renowned for his masterful architectural and interior compositions. Known for capturing the opulence and rich histories of palaces, libraries, and museums, his work has been featured in design magazines and, in collaboration with international publishers, been collated into over 70 books. He has photographed numerous notable sites, including the Vatican Library and the Palace of Versailles.
The authors
Elisabeth Sladek studied Art History in Vienna, Classical Archaeology and Judaic Studies and wrote her dissertation at the Max Planck Institute in Rome. Her special field is the history of the Baroque art and architecture and she is an active researcher and teacher, among others in Vienna, Rome and Zurich. She also publishes regularly on the respective themes.
After studying history, German language and literature, education and philosophy, Georg Ruppelt gained his PhD with a doctoral thesis on Friedrich Schiller. He subsequently worked as a librarian, becoming deputy director of the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel in 1987, and director of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek in Hanover from 2002 to 2016. Ruppelt has published over 400 essays and 40 monographs on the subject of books, library science, and cultural history.
Massimo Listri. The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries
Hardcover, 29 x 39.5 cm, 6.38 kg, 560 pagesISBN 978-3-8365-3524-3
Edition: Multilingual (English, French, German)4.9