National Library

The long building at the eastern end of the Avenue Kennedy is the National Library, and it is the newest home of one of the oldest institutions in the country. It began in 1798, in the wake of the Revolution, as the library of the new central school; it became the city library in 1803, the national library in 1899, and for nearly fifty years, from 1973, it lived in the old Jesuit college beside the cathedral, running out of shelves. A law of 2013 ordered a building fit for a national library of the twenty-first century, and on the 1st of October 2019 it moved out here and changed one word of its name: from the library "de Luxembourg", the city, to "du Luxembourg", the country.

What it keeps is everything. By law, a copy of every book, newspaper, map, score and, now, digital publication produced in Luxembourg comes here — 1.8 million printed items so far, three-quarters of them from abroad, because a country of this size reads in four languages and does most of its science in other people's. It holds the manuscripts, the old prints, the photographs, the music of Luxembourgish composers, and it publishes the national bibliography every year. Anyone can walk in and read.

Its proudest recent acquisition came in November 2024: the Giant Bible of Saint Maximin, a huge illuminated manuscript from the Trier abbey whose town house in the old town is now the Prime Minister's office, and whose monks sold Count Siegfried the rock of the Bock in 963. The book and the country turn out to have the same beginning.