Omar Marques/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images (book tower); Jim McMahon (globe)

Slovak artist Matej Krén layered books to build this 17-foot-tall tower. 

Ready to fall into a good book? Visitors to the Municipal Library of Prague can get lost in a seemingly endless tunnel of them. The library in Czechia (formerly the Czech Republic) is home to an immersive art exhibit: a colorful tower of about 8,000 books.

When you peer into the tower’s opening, the tomes seem to go on forever. Mirrors create the illusion of a dizzying tunnel that never ends, symbolizing the infinite knowledge that books can provide. Installed in 1998, the tower—called Idiom—was a hidden gem for decades even though Prague, Czechia’s capital, draws more than 8 million visitors annually.

But several years ago, the tower went viral on social media. Today it attracts long lines of tourists, with some waiting up to two hours to get a glimpse. Library staff, bewildered by all the attention, recently set up a separate entrance for the exhibit and are debating whether to charge admission.

Said library spokesperson Lenka Hanzlikova: “We’ll have to deal with it in some way, because working with tourist crowds is a completely different service from that we have provided up to now.”