The first public municipal library in Prague started its activity on 1 July 1891. At the beginning it had 3 370 books, which were used in the lending and reading rooms. In 1903 it found its permanent location on the corner of Platnéřská Street, Žatecká Street and Mariánské náměstí in the Old Town, i.e. in the place where its present Central Building stands. In 1898–1920, the director was the librarian and well-known poet
Antonín Sova, who began to build a system of catalogues, established the first six branches and tried to push for the library to get "a dignified building in the centre of the city". On 1 January 1922, a law uniting Prague and 38 other towns and municipalities came into force. At the same time, a proposal was approved to merge the libraries of these municipalities and to create a single Library of the Capital City of Prague. The library network consisted of the Central Library and 40 other libraries in the city. The collection had about 260 thousand volumes and almost 700 thousand loans were made annually. Signatures and catalogues were unified and book purchases were centralised. Other libraries were also established, and in 1938 there were libraries in 50 locations in Prague (library fund of 640 thousand volumes, number of borrowings about 2 million). Dr. Jan Thon played an important role in the development of the library and was its director in 1920-1942 and 1945–1948. During the Nazi occupation, thousands of books, racially, politically and ideologically objectionable from the Nazi point of view, were discarded and several library workers were imprisoned. The year 1945 marked the resumption of normal activities and the return of the discarded books, but after
February 1948 there was a total ideologization of all library activities and considerable organizational chaos. There was a scrapping and liquidation of part of the collection and also a personnel action against a number of qualified workers. In the second half of the 1950s, the professional level of the library was gradually restored, and the 1960s brought the development of library services. In 1966, the library became a co-organiser of the Prague Symposium on Large City Libraries and one of the initiators of INTAMEL (International Association of Large City Libraries). In 1968, the library joined the demands of the so-called
Prague Spring with its action programme. Twelve new branches were opened and other specialised departments were established (e.g. a study room for pragensia). The "People's University of Science, Technology and Art" became part of the library, engaged in educational and cultural activities, which gained the library considerable popularity in the relatively favourable climate of the time.The so-called "
normalisation" of the 1970s brought again strong ideological pressure, the creation of new "libri prohibiti", a complete freeze of international cooperation and a general stagnation of the library. Since the end of the 1970s, the library's internal work has been gradually renewed. The
revolution in 1989 marked the return to the standard status of the library in a democratic society. In 2015, the library operated 40 branches and three library buses. The largest library in the network is the Central Library on Mariánské náměstí. The director of the library is Tomáš Řehák. It is currently one of the most important and also most generously funded libraries in the Czech Republic. The library is of national importance also because it provides data on individual books to other libraries in the Czech Republic and thus has an impact on the functioning of the Czech library network.
Library directors and administrators == Central Library ==