The Starfield Library is located in the underground Coex Mall in Gangnam, Seoul. I heard that the Coex Mall is the largest underground shopping center in Asia…I’m not certain, but it was definitely BIG! It had three underground levels and in the midst of it all is the Starfield Library, which spans multiple floors and is accessible at the ground level.

It is in fact a real, functioning library. It wouldn’t be my choice as a place to sit and study since it’s in the middle of a super busy shopping center, but plenty of people didn’t seem to mind. All of the seating was full, the computers were all occupied, and there was no shortage of patrons sitting around flipping through magazines and reading books. The towering bookshelves are certainly impressive, but obviously not all of the books are accessible. So you’re probably wondering, “How do you get to the books at the top?” Well, like a regular library, the accessible books had labels on the spines and were cataloged. The higher up titles didn’t seem to have any labels (in fact, some books were fake!) and were therefore not cataloged. So the answer is, “You don’t!”

When you look the library up online, the articles all boast that the library has over 50,000 titles. I don’t know if that includes just the ones cataloged or if it includes all the ‘display’ titles as well—not that it mattered to me, I wasn’t going to be reading anything there since, of course most of the books are in Korean!