When I was sitting on a bench surrounded by countless ancient books in metres-high shelves, the smell of old leather and the special atmosphere turned my thoughts from the present to the past. I recalled that many famous personalities like Wilde and Yeats had spent time in this extraordinary library - and now, nearly a century later, I was here. My thoughts revolved around transitoriness, the transitoriness of human beings and lifetimes. How fast time goes by! But in contrast, all these books, all the written words inside and everything I could see in this library are still there and will have a continued existence even when we are gone.

I then wondered what value all these books will have for humankind in the not-too-distant future, a future in which nearly everything will be determined by computers. Will the rising computer generation just read texts on computer screens? Perhaps, but those readers will always have the old books give them a concrete hold on the genius of the past. In this special aura I realized that books are written for eternity, and that is what makes them so immensely valuable.

Ana Zimmermann