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You Can See a Swirling Sculpture Made of 8,000 Books at a Library in Prague

Officials are managing an influx of tourists coming to see “Idiom,” a seemingly infinite tunnel of books by the artist Matej Krén, at the Municipal Library

By Christian Thorsberg, Correspondent January 16, 2026

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Nearly 30 years after a dizzying sculpture fashioned from books was first installed at the Prague Municipal Library in the Czech Republic, literature lovers on TikTok and Instagram have turned the artwork into a viral fascination and unexpected tourism hotspot.

Idiom, created by Slovak artist Matej Krén, features roughly 8,000 books stacked into a tower. Mirrors placed on the top and bottom give the illusion of infinite length, and a raindrop-shaped entryway invites visitors to peek inside the wormhole—almost like they’re literally disappearing into a good book.

“The Idiom is meant to symbolize the infinity of knowledge,” according to a description of the sculpture on the library’s website. “[Books] are like bricks to [Krén], but they contain much more information, destinies, stories and knowledge. He puts them into the form of dwellings: primitive on the one hand, infinitely intelligent on the other.”

The installation made its debut at the Sao Paulo International Biennial in 1995, and in 1996 it was brought to Prague. It was first exhibited for a summer at the Jiri Svestka Gallery, which in the 1950s was a communist warehouse of banned books, before moving to its permanent home at the library in 1998.

For years, Idiom stood as little more than a familiar fixture, with its fame generally limited to the regular library-goers in the Czech capital. But beginning in 2022, the sculpture gained renown by going viral on BookTok, the pocket of TikTok dedicated to discussions of books and writing. Algorithms on Instagram similarly pushed the sculpture to the forefront of feeds.

“Kids that were in Prague looking into their phones suddenly saw a cool thing that they liked and they wanted to see it as well,” Czech journalist Janek Rubeš told Radio Prague International in 2023. “And as it is in today’s world, everyone wants to have the same picture or same video, because it looks cool and they can get likes.”

Quick fact: Idiom on the cover of Science

A photo of the sculpture was featured on the magazine’s cover in January 2011.In that issue, researchers analyzed a massive collection of 5.2million books to study cultural trends.

Today, librarians and local tourism officials are bewildered at the foot traffic the sculpture generates. During peak travel seasons—such as Christmas and Easter—more than 1,000 people each day endure wait times of more than two hours to snap a photograph.

“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,” Lenka Hanzlikova, a spokesperson for the library, tells Agence France-Presse (AFP). “Most readers laugh about it and say it’s bizarre, but we have had people who wanted to return books and joined the queue.”

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