2. Umberto Eco walks through his immense library

The most beautiful personal libraries on Earth 1. Jay Walker’s library, Connecticut

3. The personal library of retired John Hopkins University Humanities professor Richard A. Macksey

4. The magnificent library inside the Mark Twain house in Hartford, Connecticut "The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read."

5. William Randolph Hearst’s library

6. George Lucas' private library at Skywalker Ranch

7. Keith Richards' home library, Connecticut

8. Truman Capote's home library in the Hamptons

9. Nigella Lawson's home library in London

10. Neil Gaiman's personal library

11. Karl Lagerfeld’s personal library, Paris

12. Ernest Hemingway’s home library in Cuba "I think I’ve read all the biographies of Hemingway and I’ve never had a a complete sense of him until I smelled this house and saw some of these things” - A. Scott Berg, Biographer

13. Cardinal Newman's personal library

14. Rudyard Kipling's stunning home library in Bateman, East Sussex

15. Sigmund Freud’s library The father of psychoanalysis had a vast library of over 1,600 works, including the complete works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, Homer, and Sophocles.

16. Winston Churchill's home library at Chartwell

17. Gianni Botsford's Library in Cahuita, Costa Rica This private backyard library has its own entrance and deck leading out from the main house.

18. Miquel Mateu's library in Peralada, Spain

19. Diane von Furstenberg's library in Connecticut

20. George Vanderbilt’s library in Biltmore

21. Carl Jung's house library in Switzerland

22. Edith Wharton’s home library

23. Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House library The writer and her husband, Leonard Woolf, bought the house on 1 July 1919 for 700 pounds and hosted many visitors there, including T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Roger Fry, and Lytton Strachey.

24. J.R.R. Tolkien in his library at Oxford On the wall in the second picture is a map of Rohan, Gondor, and Mordor, drawn by J. R. R. Tolkien's son, Christopher, and based on the manuscript maps sketched by his father.

Here’s what Umberto Eco, the renowned scholar and novelist who owned a collection of over 50,000 volumes, had to say about books and personal libraries: "It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones. There are things in life that we need to always have plenty of supplies, even if we will only use a small portion. If, for example, we consider books as medicine, we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the 'medicine closet' and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That's why you should always have a nutrition choice! Those who buy only one book, read only that one and then get rid of it. They simply apply the consumer mentality to books, that is, they consider them a consumer product, a good. Those who love books know that a book is anything but a commodity."

“One of the most dazzling and inventive books I’ve read in a very long time—a novel I continue to describe as indescribable. I’ve now read it twice and can’t decide if it’s a thriller, a farce, a political commentary. I don’t know what it is other than I love it” —Writers at Work