Saturday, March 18, 2017

Five museums for book lovers

BOOKS, MANUSCRIPTS, AND SCROLLS: Five Best Museums For Book Lovers (Sheobi Anne Ramos, Travelers Today).
For book lovers around the globe, nothing is better than being inside a library or even just a room full of books. The scent of the pages is relaxing, and spending hours curled up with a good novel in hand is time well spent.

There are actually museums around the world dedicated to books, and if you're a bibliophile, these places might pique your interest. Pore over displays of original manuscripts and limited edition copies of books from way before, or just simply admire all these preserved pages and wonder about the stories written in them.

Fancy going in on one? Here are some of the best museums for book lovers.
I'm sure all five are excellent, but I want to flag the two with which I've had some experience.
British Library, London. The British Library is more like a museum than a library, and it's because of their free, daily exhibitions of book treasures that will make your hair stand on end. Imagine looking with your very own eyes the world's earliest printed book and the original manuscript of Beowulf-it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
The British Library appears frequently in PaleoJudaica posts. Some recent examples are here, here, here, here, and here.
Shrine Of The Book, Jerusalem. This museum is probably one of the most treasured museums in the world, only because it holds the famed Dead Sea Scrolls, the foundation upon which Christianity was born. The museum itself is a marvel-it's designed like the jars where the scrolls are found in Qumran in 1947.
The Shrine of the Book is part of the Israel Museum, which contains many marvels. A few recent posts involving the Shrine of the Book are here, here, and here.