I was falling down a random rabbit hole about libraries the other day (as you do) when I discovered a few facts about the Library of Congress in Washington DC that amused me.

The Library of Congress is the world’s biggest library, containing approximately 28 million books.

I don’t know how many hundreds of years it would take to read that many books, but I do now know that they are stored on 532 MILES of shelving.

The means that if you were on a literary road trip and travelling at a steady 70mph it would take a little under eight hours to travel from one end of that shelving highway to the other. Assuming it was all placed end to end next to a motorway, obviously.

That is A LOT of literature!

The British Library in London takes second place size-wise but it contains a measley 18 million books, so that would be less of a road trip and more of a quick day out.

(It’s not measley at all, I’ve been in there a couple of times and it’s incredible and I couldn’t decide where to look first or what to do with myself. The idea of somewhere with another 10 million tomes on top of that is, quite frankly, overwhelming!)