Boekhandel Selexyz Dominicanen (Dominican church bookstore), Maastricht, Netherlands

Imagine what it feels like to read books in an ancient church with 800 years of history. Years ago, the Dominican Church was still a place for people to park bicycles in Maastricht, Netherlands. Designer Mox brought amazing changes to this church by changing it into a book store.

The store has kept the original architectural style and only changed a little bit in terms of decoration by adding modern elements, which also make the church seem new. The feeling of reading books here under the tall and beautiful roof is fantastic. No wonder some people call it the "Paradise book store."

Stockholm Public Library

Stockholm Public Library is a library building in Stockholm, Sweden, designed by Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund, and one of the city's most notable structures. Stockholm Public Library includes more than 2 million volumes and 2.4 million audio tapes, CDs and audio books. The "international library" is the section for foreign languages, housed in two floors of an annex behind the main building, close to Odenplan. Its holdings comprise more than 100 languages with 17,000 volumes in Persian, 15,800 in Arabic, and 14,500 in Spanish. In 2007 the most borrowed languages were Russian (19,300 loans), Thai, Spanish, Persian, Chinese, Arabic, Polish and Japanese. For some of these languages, Stockholm serves public libraries in the rest of Sweden through interlibrary loans.