Many who travel on the busy College Road in Chennai often miss the beautiful colonial-era Indo-Saracenic style red sandstone building tucked in the Directorate of Public Instruction (DPI) campus.
The over-a-century-old building houses the library run by the Madras Literary Society (MLS), which historian S. Muthiah recorded as “perhaps the oldest subscription library east of Suez [canal].”
On entering the building, one is welcomed by the sight of thousands of books kept on huge shelves that extend from the floor to the high ceiling, which gives the deceptive look of being a two-storey structure from the outside. While the aesthetically designed building was constructed for the library only in 1905-06, the society and the library themselves are 210 years old.
