Designed to be an intellectual and cultural center, the new Stuttgart municipal library was built in 2011, a towering nine-story cube. Outside, it's constructed of pale gray concrete framing glass bricks. Inside, it's stark white. Books that line the walls of the light-flooded five-story gallery hall are the only splashes of color. At night, the library is illuminated in different colors.

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library is a small gem in Weimar that houses books, maps, musical scripts and ancestral registers. It's named after the duchess who saw to it that the court's book collection was moved into the Rococo library in 1766. A fire in 2004 destroyed part of the precious collection. After undergoing restoration, the UNESCO-listed building reopened three years later.

Bibliotheca Augusta, the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, is one of the oldest libraries in the world that has made it to the present day without losses to its famous collections. An avid book collector, Duke August (1579-1666) made it one of the largest European libraries of his day. Scholars continue to turn to the library for its wealth of medieval literature.

Due to its cranial shape, this library in Berlin has been dubbed "The Brain." It houses the libraries for the philosophy and humanities departments at the capital's Freie Universität and has quickly become an architectural landmark. It was designed by internationally renowned architect Norman Foster and opened in 2005.

The Oberlausitz Library of Sciences in Görlitz, right on the border with Poland, dates back to 1806. Plain but inviting, it is one of the most striking early classicist library halls. More than 140,000 books document the history, culture, nature and society of the region between Dresden to the West and Wroclaw to the East.

The spectacular Grimm Center is a part of Berlin's Humboldt University. Built in 2009, it houses a library and the university's computer and media services. The reading room, above, is at the heart of the building. It gives people "a sense of the outdoors" through its size and tiered, almost scenic design, says architect Max Dudler. It offers "the feeling of reading under the open sky."

Collections begun in the mid-16th century have grown to more 10 million books in the Bavarian State Library in Munich, once known as the Bibliotheca Regia Monacensis. The collections found a home in the current building between 1832 and 1843, which was almost completely destroyed during World War II. The library took years to rebuild.

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.