A One-of-a-Kind Vacation with Books

Near the border of England in Wales, you can unplug for one of the most unique vacations I've heard about to date

Travelers visiting Gladstone's Library may find themselves on vacation in a quiet nook with a good book, or perhaps lounging by a fireplace, reading

Gladstone's Library is the only residential library in Britain. and it's only Prime Ministerial Library, too

And you can stay on site, taking a literary vacation to New Heights

William Gladstone, the library's namesake, was Prime Minister of Great Britain four times

And as Peter Francis tells me, he was also quite the voracious reader

Peter, how many books are in this collection? There are about 250,000 books of which

about 30,000 were Gladstone's original books. and he read a staggering 22,000 of them

That's about a book a day. And it's not as though he wasn't doing other things

He was Prime Minister four times, our finance minister for 13 years and so on

So he had a very full life, and yet he still found time to read

I think you get the impression with Gladstone that work and sleep equals 24

There's no lolling about watching Homeland or something. Well, that makes me feel really badly

about my reading all this point. I know, and mine. And mine

But because he was so involved with books he also was very keen on how they were shelved and so on So he was the man in fact who invented sliding shelves in libraries which is a little known fact

Because also we have all his private papers, his library was very much the model, the template for presidential libraries

Woodrow Wilson was fascinated by Gladstone and it sort of started from there

So lots of contributions here. Lots of contributions, yeah. Yes, and of the 22,000 books at Gladstone read

he actually, it was a close reading. He actually made annotations often all the way

through the books and sometimes little comments on them. I'll see if I can find one for you, let's see

It'll be a little nice thing to come upon. Yes, well, I mean, you know, the chances are

because half of them do have annotations. Here, for instance, there's a biography of Wilberforce

the anti-slavery campaigner, and I know at the end of this, one, there's a quote about, I breakfasted with Mr. Wilberforce on the 25th of July, four days

before his death. He asked for my father and how is your sweet mother

His conversation was cheerful, musical and flowing. His prayer like that of one already released

And it's those little things, these little details that make the books come alive, I think

And they're all on the shelves, but you can just browse and look at them. Little treasures you can find if you come here to read

Indeed. An insight into Gladstone. An insight into class. A different place to relax and learn something new

in our increasingly technological world