treehugger: “A few weeks back I wrote about how you should set yourself a ‘secret mission’ when traveling in a foreign city. The idea is that, by pursuing something interests you, you’ll escape the usual tourist traps and see more of a city’s local side. For me, that’s often food shops and market stalls. Others seek out supermarkets, pharmacies, music stores, and bakeshops. Now I have another suggestion: Why not engage in library tourism? This fun idea comes via an article in The Daily Beast, titled, “We Took Our Young Children on a Library World Tour — And It Was Marvellous.” Stuart Kells recounts his family’s quest to visit several of the most prominent libraries in the world, including,

“In Switzerland: Zurich’s Bibliothek and the wonderful 18th-century Abbey Library of St. Gall. In London: the British Library and Lambeth Palace. At Oxford, the Bodleian. In the U.S., the Morgan, the Folger, the Houghton, the Smithsonian, plus the great public libraries of New York and Boston, and the ‘head office’ of them all: the Library of Congress.”