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(51,093 posts) Mon May 17, 2021, 12:25 AM May 2021

The Over-the-Top Library with a Secret Treasure

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The Daily Beast
@thedailybeast
Tucked into one of the walls of the St. Louis Central Library is an elegant but easily missed double door leading to a true treasure trove

The Over-the-Top Library with a Secret Treasure
Tucked into one of the walls of the St. Louis Central Library is an elegant but easily missed double door leading to a true treasure trove.
thedailybeast.com
9:15 PM · May 16, 2021

https://www.thedailybeast.com/st-louis-over-the-top-library-with-a-secret-treasure

It would be understandable if, after taking in the ornate reading rooms and grand hallways of the St. Louis Central Library, you deemed your thirst for literary splendor sated. However, tucked into one of those walls is an elegant but easily missed double door underneath a broken pediment leading to a true treasure trove filled with items that would fetch eye-popping sums at auction.

Fittingly, they are books.

Not the greatest twist, I suppose, but these are not any old books.

First editions of Palladio and Alberti as well as 16th century printings of Vitruvius—oh, and first editions of Piranesi etchings that once belonged to the House of Lords. All of these sit behind glass and wood cabinets in an English country house library hidden within the I-Am-America-Hear-Me-Roar Gilded Age splendor of the St. Louis Central Library—a combination that makes it the latest selection for our series, The World’s Most Beautiful Libraries.

“There is no library in Europe that has been developed on a like scale in the same length of time,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat breathlessly declared in 1912 when the library opened. Making virtue out of the nouveau, it argued that St. Louis’ true feat was the short span of time between when it opened its first library and when it built a public space of such grandeur. Whereas, it pointed out, “the main library of Paris dates back even to the time of Charlemagne. Louis XII was the first to give it special attention and Louis XV in 1724 provided it with the present home. Many centuries cover its creation.”

*snip*