For its ubiquity and richness, especially in those examples that survive from before the Second World War, the American library building stands as a reflection of the country’s enlightened calling. Over the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the twentieth, library design paired historicized style with the latest innovative solutions for the safe housing and circulation of its collections. The references to the history of art and civilization that these buildings displayed on their faces—and the great expense dedicated to their creation and upkeep by their underwriters—reflected a reverence for the culture of the book contained within.
American Libraries: 1730–1950, written by Kenneth Breisch for a series by the Library of Congress and published in 2017, tells this history in a visual and compelling way. While the eighteenth century saw the creation of important American private and subscription libraries, only Benjamin Franklin’s Library Company of Philadelphia (founded in 1731) and the New York Society Library (founded in 1754) had buildings dedicated to their collections by the turn of the nineteenth century. America’s interest in library design began in earnest after 1800. Over the following century and into the early years of the twentieth, libraries took the country by storm. Planners found inspiration in the grand mid-nineteenth-century examples of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris (designed by Henri Labrouste and constructed between 1844–50) and the Reading Room of the British Museum in London (Sydney Smirke, 1854–57). American library construction took off after the Civil War to reach the pinnacle of the movement as seen in such edifices as the main branch of the Boston Public Library (McKim, Mead & White, 1895), the main branch of the New York Public Library (Carrère & Hastings, 1911), and Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library (James Gamble Rogers, 1931).
Unlike the museum, the library is an ancient form. The Ambrosian Library in Milan (Lelio Buzzi and Francesco Maria Richini, 1603–09) and the Bodleian Library at Oxford (Thomas Holt, 1610–13) provided the “hall model” for early American library construction, one that lined the high walls of the main rooms with books. Centuries later, private showcase collections such as New York’s J. Pierpont Morgan Library (McKim, Mead & White, 1902–06), Rhode Island’s John Carter Brown Library (Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, 1904), California’s Huntington Library (Myron Hunt, 1920), and Washington’s Folger Shakespeare Library (Paul P. Cret and Alexander B. Trowbridge, 1928–32) continued the tradition of the Renaissance treasure-house design.