Literature

Great Book Sculptures: The Book Tunnel of Prague

The sculpture that brings a whole new meaning to ‘lost in a good book’

For World Book Day, we thought we’d share this marvellous book sculpture, known variously as a Book Tunnel, Book Wormhole, and Book Vortex, but officially titled Idiom and created by Slovakian-born sculptor and artist Matej Kren. It’s also sometimes referred to as the ‘tower of books’ and was installed in Prague Municipal Library in 1998. Click on the image below to enlarge it and enter the book vortex.

Book Tunnel Prague

The sculpture uses mirrors to create the illusion that you’re looking into an endless vortex of books. We can’t think of a better visual metaphor, not only for the wealth of knowledge and imaginative literature to be found in our libraries, but also the sentiment that many book-readers feel keenly: too many books, not enough time. (The Japanese language has a word for this phenomenon.)

You can see more pictures of Kren’s book sculpture here.

For more lovely book pictures, check out our stunning pictures of libraries (and our follow-up post). For some lovely words every book-lover should know, check out our list of great book-related words.

Image: Via Petr Kratochvil on Publicdomainpictures.net.

16 Comments

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  3. What a treat ….
    Exceptional!

  4. That’s pretty cool

  5. Pingback: Great Book Sculptures: The Book Tunnel of Prague | Old School Garden

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  7. Reblogged this on The English Professor at Large and commented:
    Spectacular! Books, books, books.

  8. Spectacular! This is real find. Do I have your permission to re-blog it?

  9. This is just awesome!

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  13. Beautiful! :-) I like it!