For more than 1,200 years, monks at the Abbey of Saint Gall in Switzerland collected, copied, and preserved manuscripts. Its magnificent Rococo library hall, completed in the 1760s, houses part of a collection that includes around 2,100 medieval manuscripts. While wars, fires, and political upheavals destroyed countless books across Europe, generations at Saint Gall protected works of theology, literature, music, and science. The library’s extraordinary beauty reveals how seriously its builders regarded the preservation of knowledge. A civilization’s intellectual inheritance survives because someone considers it worth protecting, even when its original authors are long forgotten.