Franck Bohbot’s House of Books: Library Interiors and Reading-Room Architecture

A long reading table leads toward a distant wall. Shelves repeat around the room, and a ceiling gives the whole scene a sense of scale. Franck Bohbot’s House of Books photographs make libraries feel like places you can explore with your eyes before you take a single book from a shelf.

In his own presentation of the series, Bohbot describes an exploration of libraries and their individual character. The photographs reward looking at architecture as part of the reading experience: how a room gathers light, organises movement and gives people somewhere to settle.

Start with the route your eye takes

In the selected library interiors, tables and shelving create strong lines toward the back of the frame. A balanced viewpoint makes those repetitions easy to follow.

Try covering the upper half of an image for a moment. The furniture and shelves may create one composition; revealing the ceiling adds another. The room becomes a relationship between the scale of a person sitting at a desk and the much larger space above.

That is one of the pleasures of architectural photography. The building is familiar in function, but careful framing makes its arrangement newly visible.

Three Paris interiors, three different impressions

The oval reading room at the Bibliothèque nationale de France surrounds the viewer with curved tiers and a broad overhead opening. Its shape encourages your attention to travel around the room as well as toward its centre.

The Bibliothèque du Sénat offers a different emphasis, with an elongated space and richly decorated surfaces. In the Bibliothèque Mazarine, shelving, tables and the ceiling’s ornament create another distinct rhythm.

The historical photographs preserve the rooms as Bohbot recorded them. Furniture, lighting and access arrangements may differ when a visitor arrives years later.

A useful update: the BnF’s Oval Room

The BnF’s current Oval Room page says the space at Richelieu is open to everyone free of charge. It reopened in 2022 after restoration and combines a remarkable interior with books available for reading on site, including a substantial comics collection.

Check current opening days and any exceptional closures before visiting. Access to this room should not be confused with automatic entry to every research room, museum space or exhibition elsewhere in the institution.

For a wider comparison of actual visitor experiences, use our library-visit guide. A working reading room, a guided historic interior and an exhibition each offer something different.

Make the visit about more than the photograph

If you enter a library that welcomes general visitors, leave yourself time to sit or browse where permitted. Keep photography discreet and follow the room’s rules so readers can continue using the space comfortably.

Notice one small feature as well as the grand view: a desk lamp, a stair detail or the way daylight reaches the end of a shelf. For another cultural interior where the room itself matters, explore four opera houses. A memorable building often reveals its character through both the panorama and the detail you almost missed.

Paris and Rome: the opening library sequence

The opening group moves from the Bibliothèque du Sénat to the Bibliothèque Mazarine, with two views of each, before reaching Biblioteca Angelica. Keeping those neighbouring views together shows how a different position can change the impression of the same room.

The Biblioteca Angelica photograph broadens a gallery otherwise strongly associated with Paris. Compare the arrangement of shelving and the space given to the reading area with the preceding French interiors. Bohbot’s recurring subject is not simply a large quantity of books. It is the room built around them, including the relationship between a reader’s scale and an architectural space that extends far above it.

Boston and the BnF François-Mitterrand site

Boston Public Library and the BnF François-Mitterrand site broaden the sequence beyond the opening Paris and Rome interiors. Compare the way each photograph guides the eye through furniture, shelves and overhead space. Keep the institution's founding separate from the history of a particular building or room: they need not share a date. Here the images belong to Bohbot's architectural project, with their names providing starting points for further reading about each setting and its current public or research access.

Sainte-Geneviève and the Sorbonne

The Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève and Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de la Sorbonne images reward comparison of overhead structure, windows and the repeated places for readers. Several views of one library can reveal different relationships between those elements. Keeping them together allows a reader to move from an overall impression to smaller details instead of losing the sequence after a single representative photograph.

Biblioteca Vallicelliana and the return to Paris

The original selection includes two views identified as Biblioteca Vallicelliana in Rome before returning to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. That geographical shift is part of the gallery’s rhythm. The final Paris image can be compared with the opening one, while the Roman interiors keep the collection from becoming a story about only one city. The archive identifies the libraries by name; a photograph does not establish present visitor access or identify every object in a room.

The photographer’s larger interest in public interiors

The original profile situated House of Books among Bohbot’s photographs of theatres, stations, museums, swimming pools and courts. That background helps explain the series: each is a space designed for a particular human activity, with its own patterns of movement and pause. In the libraries, a table or chair can stand in for the absent reader. The rooms remain working environments even when a carefully composed photograph makes them feel almost theatrical.