Chester Beatty Library

Listen for a moment. The traffic of Dame Street fades behind you, and the gravel paths of Dublin Castle crunch softly underfoot. Ahead stands a calm, pale building with a clock tower above it. Inside, the air is cool and the light is low. That dimness is deliberate. Many of the objects here are centuries old, made of paper, silk, vellum and pigment, and bright light would slowly fade them. So step inside gently and let your eyes adjust.

This is the Chester Beatty Library, and the name can mislead first-time visitors. It is not a lending library. You cannot borrow a book here. It is a museum built around one man's collection of manuscripts, rare books, prints, paintings and decorative objects. The collection comes from across Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. Few places in the world let you walk from an Egyptian papyrus to a Japanese woodblock print in a few minutes.

The man behind it all was Alfred Chester Beatty. He was born in New York in the 1870s and trained as a mining engineer. He made a very large fortune in mining, especially copper, and he moved to London in the early twentieth century. Wherever he travelled, he collected. He had an eye for quality and condition. He bought illuminated manuscripts, beautifully bound books, and objects that showed fine craftsmanship at the highest level.

Here is the first surprise for many visitors. Beatty was American, he lived for decades in London, and yet he chose Dublin. He moved to Ireland around 1950 and brought his collection with him. He built a library to house it in the south of the city. When he died in 1968, he left the collection in trust for the public. Ireland honoured him in return. He became the country's first honorary citizen, and he received a state funeral.

For several decades the collection stayed in that first building in a quiet residential area. Then, in 2000, it moved here, into the grounds of Dublin Castle. The castle was the centre of British rule in Ireland for centuries. Today the same grounds hold a collection of world cultures, open to anyone who walks through the gate. Not long after the move, the museum won a European award as museum of the year.

The main displays sit on two upper floors. One gallery focuses on the arts of the book, meaning how books were made, decorated and bound in different cultures. The other gallery focuses on sacred traditions. It covers the great religions and philosophies of the world through their written texts. Between them, you can follow how people across many centuries chose to record the ideas that mattered most to them.

Start with the sacred traditions, because this is where the second surprise waits. Among the treasures here are some of the earliest surviving copies of books of the Christian New Testament, written on papyrus. Scholars date several of these papyri to the third century, and one group of letters attributed to Saint Paul may be even older. They are fragile, brown and fragmentary. Yet each fragment is a direct physical link to the first generations of Christian communities.

Nearby, the Islamic collection is one of the finest outside the Muslim world. Look for copies of the Qur'an written in elegant calligraphy, some with gold illumination and deep blue pigments. In Islamic tradition, calligraphy is considered a high art form, because the written word carries the sacred text. Notice how the scripts change from one region and century to another. Some are angular and bold. Others flow in long, graceful curves across the page.

Now move east. The East Asian holdings include Chinese, Japanese and other Asian works. Look for Japanese woodblock prints, with their flat areas of colour and sharp outlines. There are painted scrolls, which were made to be unrolled slowly, scene by scene, like a story told over time. Among the Chinese objects are books made from thin plates of jade, carved with characters and joined together. Picture the patience needed to engrave text into stone that hard.

The Arts of the Book gallery asks a simple question. How do you make a book? The answers differ a great deal. Some books here are made of palm leaves, tied with string. Others are folded like an accordion. Some are bound in tooled leather, or covered with lacquer, or decorated with precious stones. It is a good reminder that the paperback in your bag is only one small branch of a very large family.

When your eyes need a rest, climb to the roof garden. It is a small, quiet space with planting and views across the rooftops of the castle complex. Downstairs, the ground floor café serves food inspired by the regions that the collection covers. It is a pleasant place to sit and sort through what you have seen. The museum works best in short visits with breaks, rather than one long march.

Step back outside and look across the lawn in front of the building. This is the Dubhlinn Garden. Its name comes from the Irish words for black pool, and that pool gave Dublin its name. A dark tidal pool once lay near this spot, where a small river met the Liffey. Look closely at the grass. Pale paths curve through the lawn in a pattern that many visitors miss from ground level.

As you leave, take one last look at the clock tower and the quiet garden. Behind those walls, papers from Cairo, Kyoto, Isfahan and Rome rest side by side in the dim, careful light. They are here because one collector chose this city. Walk back toward the castle gate slowly. Listen to the gravel again, and to the city rising around you, and carry a little of that stillness with you.