The Central Library Oodi in Helsinki is a designer lover's dream. The architecture of the three-story building highlights Finland's natural world, with a wood-clad exterior and a wavy shape that resembles snow drifts. With a movie theater and sauna inside, the library built to mark the country's centenary is about more than just books.

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar got its present name in 1991. It had previously been called simply the "Herzogliche Bibliothek" ("The Ducal Library") for 300 years. The building with its famous rococo hall (above) was partially destroyed in a fire, but it reopened on October 24, 2007.

The new municipal library in the southwest German city of Stuttgart, is designed in the shape of a cube and is therefore also referred to as a "book cube." The building was designed by Korean architect Eun Young Yi and opened in 2011. There is space for half a million books and other media.

Don't worry if you don't have a student card, the library of the University of Technology in Delft, the Netherlands is worth visiting even without it. The sloping, grass-grown top of the building is particularly striking, and the 42-meter-high cone that pierces the building in the middle hides four floors full of books.

British newspaper "The Daily Telegraph" included the Biblioteca Joanina in Coimbra, Portugal in the 2013 list of the most spectacular libraries in the world. It bears the name of the Portuguese king John V, who commissioned its construction. All bookshelves are made of tulipwood and ebony, and the place is now part of the Faculty of Law.

The Library of Alexandria was the most famous library in the world before it was destroyed in flames about 2,000 years ago. It is said to have contained the whole knowledge of the then world on about 490,000 papyrus rolls. The new library of Alexandria, which continues the tradition, opened in 2002. Its final cost? More than 220 million dollars (€187 m.).

Some of the specimens in possession of the Abbey library of Saint Gall in St. Gallen, Switzerland are over 1,300 years old, and visitors can see the monastery plan, the oldest building plan in Europe, or an Egyptian mummy. The Büchersaal ("The Book Hall," above) has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1983.

Pay a visit to the Library of Congress whenever you are in Washington, D. C. The library was founded in 1800 but was burnt down by the British just 14 years later. Thomas Jefferson, the third President of the United States, sold about 6,500 books from his private collection to fund the $24,000 restoration. The main reading room pictured above was built in the Neo-Renaissance style.

The double-storey "Long Room" in the old Trinity College Library in Dublin is 64 meters long and 12 meters wide. But the space wasn't always as impressive as it is today. Its flat, plaster ceiling was removed in 1858 and substituted by a new roof made of oak.

The New York Public Library has starred in several films, including the musical "42nd Street" from 1933, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" (1961), "Ghostbusters" (1984) and "Spider-Man" (2002). It is also where Carrie and Mr. Big get married in the 2008 "Sex and the City" film. Opened in 1911, the impressive main reading room is currently being expanded.

With an archive of more than 30 million books and other media, the National Library of China is one of the seven largest libraries in the world. It was built as the "Capital Library" in 1809 and later renamed the "Beijing Library" in 1928 after the People's Republic of China was established. Its current name was approved by the state in 1998.

The country of poets and thinkers - it's a mantra I've heard Germans repeat innumerable times in both self-praise and mockery, and the book is central to it. Germans' relationship to books reveals deep-seated conservatism and an ever critical assessment of what constitutes progress. I can't help but be intrigued by a place where buying books has become political, a show of solidarity and concern.

I was raised with this Duden, a pre-Internet font of knowledge in which labeled drawings describe our world in precise detail, from atom to jewelry, breweries to war ships, geometry to edible mushrooms. My father got the book in Munich in 1961 and praised it as an example of German genius. I was impressed enough to bring the book to school for "show and tell." Only much later could I read it.

I grew up seeing libraries as valued public institutions where people of all ages rubbed shoulders. I was taken aback by Berlin's libraries when I moved there in 1990. They were run-down places with worn and dated stocks. I joined the librarians' protest against city plans to charge for borrowing books. Even in anti-socialist America, we didn't expect people to pay for library books, I thought.

The one library I saw that didn't suffer from neglect was Berlin's Staatsbibliothek, a modern building designed by architect Hans Scharoun. The "Staabi" had a serene reading room that drew me in. But a peculiarity put me off: Visitors were not allowed in the stacks. To borrow a book, you filled in a form and a librarian fetched it. Browsing was impossible. Readers had to know what they wanted.

I worked in East Berlin's city library as the collection was being merged with West Berlin's AGB library. My boss, Frau Reiss, was a reserved older lady with a page-boy haircut whose life had been turned upside-down in 1961. She came home from a vacation in Bulgaria to find the Berlin Wall had cut her off from her beloved brother, a pianist in the city's West. She felt cut off from the world.

As a schoolgirl, Frau Reiss had helped out in a library in the small town in Thuringia where she came from. Once she found herself shut off from the outside world, she found refuge in books. As a librarian she had access to the "Giftschrank," the books banned by the East German authorities. She and her husband lived their lives vicariously through books until the Berlin Wall fell.

The first book I read in blackletter was a beaten edition of Goethe's "Elective Affinities." My German friends were blasé about my feat: Gothic script was nothing extraordinary to them. It was as if they had been able to discern "s" and "f" from birth. The book became one of my favorites, which helped make me feel part of German society. It seemed like everyone had read and loved Goethe.

It was a momentous occasion when KulturKaufhaus Dussmann opened its doors in Berlin in 1997. My German friends and I saw it as a temple to books. It was also the first bookstore in the city outfitted with armchairs where you were welcome to browse for hours on end - and it was open far later than other stores in town. We didn't realize the concept came from America. It didn't find imitators here.

It's a 15-minute drive from the Rhineland village where I now live to the next bookstore. The shop is busy with customers this Saturday. The middle-aged owner sees her store as a bastion against corporate power and the decline of town centers. A customer pipes up to criticize Amazon's labor policies. Shopping in any bookstore in Germany has virtually become a statement against the US behemoth.

The shop owner is proud to call herself "dusty." She has neither an online store, nor does she sell e-books. She uses the Internet but mistrusts it. That is typical of booksellers here, and not just them. Two dictatorships in living memory have left Germans extremely sensitive about privacy and data protection. Here you can shop anonymously, if you pay with cash.