The Library: A World History

The Library Essay

The Bookcase Shaped the Building

James Campbell, an architectural historian at Cambridge, and the photographer Will Pryce travelled to some eighty libraries across twenty-one countries to make this 2013 history, the first attempt to tell the story of library architecture as a single world subject. Their theme is that the buildings have always been shaped by the book itself: chained folios demanded lecterns, the printing press demanded wall shelving and galleries, and each solution produced its own kind of room.

The result, published by Thames and Hudson, moves from Chinese pavilions and monastic halls through the baroque splendours of Austria and Portugal to the modern national libraries, in photographs made specially for the book. It has become the standard illustrated history of the type, a study of what happens when architecture takes its orders from reading.