8,000-Book Tower in Prague Draws 1,000 Daily Visitors

A library sculpture that's been quietly standing in Prague for nearly three decades just became one of the Czech Republic's hottest tourist destinations, and social media made it happen.

Idiom, created by Slovak artist Matej Krén, features 8,000 books stacked into a towering cylinder. Mirrors on the top and bottom create the illusion of infinite length, while a raindrop-shaped opening lets visitors peer inside what looks like an endless tunnel of literature.

The installation first debuted at the São Paulo International Biennial in 1995 before finding its permanent home at Prague Municipal Library in 1998. For over two decades, it remained a quiet fixture known mainly to regular library visitors in the Czech capital.

Everything changed in 2022 when BookTok discovered it. The book-loving corner of TikTok and Instagram's algorithms pushed photos of the mesmerizing sculpture into millions of feeds worldwide.

Now the library faces a challenge it never anticipated. During Christmas and Easter, more than 1,000 people each day wait over two hours just to snap a photograph inside the installation.

"We'll have to deal with it in some way, because working with tourist crowds is a completely different service from that we have provided up to now," says Lenka Hanzlikova, a library spokesperson. Some confused visitors even join the tourist queue thinking they're waiting to return books.

The Ripple Effect

The viral fame has transformed how the library operates. Officials recently converted one of five entrances into a designated doorway exclusively for tourists visiting Idiom.

They're also considering charging admission fees to manage the crowds. The sculpture even graced the cover of Science magazine in 2011, illustrating a study that analyzed 5.2 million books to understand cultural trends.

Krén himself seems surprised by the attention. "I thought it would fall into oblivion," he told Agence France-Presse. "It was not designed for a mass presentation like this."

The artist has created several similar book sculptures over the years, including Gravity Mixer, Passage, Book Cell, and Beauty and the Book, exhibited across Europe. But none have captured imaginations quite like Idiom.

The sculpture's message feels more relevant than ever: books as infinite sources of knowledge, each one a brick containing countless stories and destinies. Sometimes it takes a viral moment to remind us why libraries matter.