The book and its guardian angel, the *Library*.

Even the quietest of buildings can make a loud-and-clear design statement. Housed in architecturally ambitious structures, they are places that celebrate human achievement with awesome environments.

Guess what?

It's a *library*.The library of Congress. Beautiful!Isn't it?

The Great Hall.

Legenday Libraries - World’s great storehouses of knowledge.

Not only are they storehouses of thousands of years of knowledge, they are also places to study, to browse serendipitously, to snooze, to dream, to admire beautiful printed books. Oh yes!, printed books.Not the Electronic versions.Holding and reading a printed book is always an enduring tactile pleasure.

It's open to the public.But we  aren't allowed  to check out books.Only the senators members of congress and other high ranking govt officials can.
It's one of the two largest libraries in the world,the other being the British library.

And yes,In US alone there are 1,20,000 libraries.

The leaders of the world's power house have a library of their own and it's the world's largest.Almost half our leaders are not even educated enough to appreciate a good library.

By the way this one has a pretty interesting history.

The Library of Congress was established by an act of Congress in 1800.The original library was housed in the new Capitol until August 1814, when invading British troops set fire to the Capitol Building, burning and pillaging the contents of the small library.Within a month, retired President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library( 6,487 books) as a replacement. Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating books, "putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science"; his library was considered to be one of the finest in the United States.

This is the British library.

British Library is not that biased,not restricted only to the govt - anyone who has a permanent address can borrow books.

Some more marvellous storehouses here and here.

Just imagine sitting in a place full of Stories,History,Autobiographies,Memoirs,Travelogues.Holy shit!So many of them.What a pleasure!And not to forget, buildings like 'palaces'.So Royal.So passionately made.
Oh my God! They are so beautiful.Just SO beautiful.