For the record, you can’t actually check the book of Kells out of Trinity Library. But you can pay €18 to reserve a time to stand in line, walk through a maze of floor-to-ceiling panels there to tell you why the book matters, and then go into the tomb-ish room where the book sits behind glass. As a momentary nod is about all this book elicits and since, as I say, you can’t take it with you, you move on to the library itself.
While not quite Bodleian in its “we run the word” opulence nor as heart-stoppingly perfect architecturally as the steps up to the Laurentian, this reading room checks the “magnificent enough” box for those tourists trying to justify having traded four pints worth of cash to see old paneling, marble statues, and books no one will ever touch.
Admittedly, it is kind of nice that everyone wants to see a silly old book before seeing a place where lots of other possibly less silly books sit. I half heard a joke in my friend Jerry’s voice about how, in five hundred years, you will stand in line just to see any printed matter at all. “You mean people had to turn pages?” The text matters here and I would not wish to berate that.
Still, this whole shebang is one of those Mona Lisa/Rosetta Stone situations in which the Disneyland vacationer knows no more than that they should not miss what others, according to a website of “top attractions” have not missed. If you go to Dublin to honor your Irish roots or for the beer and Whiskey tours, you shall see the Book of Kells too. It has been so writ and not to do so would be a violation of life lived on the road most traveled.