5 truly unique libraries

1 Haskell Free Library & Opera House, Vermont (USA) & Québec (Canada)

It’s rare that you can read a book in two countries at once – but you can in The Haskell. Standing partly in Derby Line, Vermont, partly in Stanstead, Canada, its reading room actually spans the Us-canada border. So readers can start a sentence in one country and finish it in another.

2 Hereford Cathedral Library, UK

Until as recently as the 18th century, many libraries chained books to shelves to thwart thieves. Hereford Cathedral has one of the few surviving chained libraries, housing volumes dating back to the eighth century. Tours also take in the Mappa Mundi, the world’s largest medieval map, made around 1300.

3 Liyuan Library, Beijing, China

This beautiful library sits in a small village on the fringes of Beijing. Covered entirely by thousands of sticks of firewood, it is impossibly elegant and performs a vital service for the local villagers. Just nobody light a match!

4 The Future Library, Oslo, Norway

Each year since 2014, a different author has added an unpublished manuscript to Oslo’s Deichman Library. In 2114, a specially planted forest in nearby Nordmarka will be harvested to make paper to print these works. If you can’t wait 90 years, you can visit the forest and the room in which the manuscripts are stored.

5 Mundaneum, Mons, Belgium

This early 20th-century attempt to create a kind of paper Google, 90 years before the internet, aimed to store and categorise all recorded knowledge. But was it a library? Kind of. Its attempt to democratise learning was certainly in the spirit of the great libraries – and its archive holds an incredible 12 million items.