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.