Whether it’s a special trip to the Library of Congress or a 10-minute drive to the local library, when true lovers of books hear the words “Let’s head for the library,” they experience the same stab of excitement produced by the words “ice cream parlor” in a 5-year-old. For bibliophiles, the Magic Kingdom isn’t in Florida, and the only price of admission is a library card.
For some libraries, of course, Magic Kingdom is an apt description. Harvard’s Widener Library, for example, is not only a building of beauty and grace, but it also contains 57 miles of shelf space and can hold over three million books. The Library of Congress in Washington has the largest collection in the world and offers a cornucopia of artistic and architectural delights. The Iowa law library in Des Moines is a tangled extravaganza of artwork, beautifully tiled floors, terraces, and twisting stairs visited by over 100,000 visitors a year. In Virginia’s Northern Shenandoah Valley is Winchester’s Handley Library, another architectural gem, which the National Park Service says is “perhaps Virginia’s purest expression of the regal and florid Beaux Arts classicism.”
Lovely as they are, like any community library these buildings and others like them have one chief purpose: to preserve books and other resources, and make them available to the public. In a sense, they are the secular counterparts of our places of worship, gathering places for those seeking enlightenment and wisdom.
A Snapshot History of Public Libraries
Founded in 1640, the Biblioteca Palafoxiana in Puebla, Mexico, is recognized as the oldest public library in North America.
Nearly 3,000 miles to the north, Massachusetts Puritans and Virginia planters who colonized these lands soon took pride in their home libraries. In Philadelphia, booklover Benjamin Franklin, who over a lifetime amassed more than 4,000 volumes in his private library, helped open the first subscription library in Philadelphia as well as lent his influence to create medical, philosophical, and university libraries.
Only in 1790 was the first real public library founded in the United States, in a small town in Massachusetts, and therein lies a story. Formerly known as Exeter, the town changed its name to Franklin in 1778, and then some of the inhabitants, their names now lost to history, asked the revered Franklin to donate a bell for the steeple of the town meeting hall. Franklin turned down that request, but he offered books instead, replying “sense being preferable to sound.” Known among the townspeople as the Franklin Collection, the books circulated free of charge after 1790.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, public libraries become commonplace in the United States, points of pride in cities and towns, and they were a driving force in the nation’s development. Individual citizens, local governments, and donations from the wealthy—Andrew Carnegie used some of his fortune to build 1,679 public libraries—built these repositories for books, thereby enhancing the education of millions of Americans.
Meanwhile, private collectors made their own impact on libraries and library architecture, most noticeably so during the period after the Civil War, the so-called Gilded Era. With enormous funds at their disposal, wealthy bibliophiles indulged themselves by purchasing rare works or bringing together books on subjects that particularly interested them. And some of them built libraries.
In the early 20th century, for example, financier Pierpont Morgan had a library constructed adjacent to his Madison Avenue residence in New York to house his burgeoning collection of literature, old manuscripts, and drawings and prints. Architect Charles McKim designed three magnificent rooms to resemble a Renaissance palazzo. Following his father’s death, “in what constituted one of the most momentous cultural gifts in U.S. history,” according to The Morgan Library and Museum website, J.P. Morgan opened the library to scholars and the public. Later additions, including one that was completed in 2006 and added spaces like a lecture hall, a restaurant, and a reading room to the complex, have helped make The Morgan Library & Museum a Manhattan landmark.
Gifts From the Brothers Vanderbilt
One of the greatest 19th-century American architects, Richard Morris Hunt (1827–1895), who had attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, showed a keen interest in libraries throughout his career. In the early 1870s, he designed a library for James Lenox, one of New York’s wealthiest men. The Lenox Library was one of the city’s first libraries accessible to the public. It housed arcades, reading rooms, and valuable manuscripts and art, and stood until 1912, when entrepreneur and art collector Henry Frick demolished the building and built what is today a museum of art: The Frick Collection.
The Vanderbilt Library in Ashville, North Carolina. (The Biltmore Company)
Two of Hunt’s libraries that have survived the ravages of time are meccas for booklovers from around the world. Like Morgan and Frick, Cornelius Vanderbilt accumulated vast wealth during his lifetime. One of his grandsons, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, commissioned Hunt to design The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, a 70-room “cottage” that is today visited by hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. His brother George Vanderbilt likewise engaged Hunt and had him draw up the plans for the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, which is the largest private home ever built in America and which again is a major tourist attraction.
Cornelius and George were inveterate readers and collectors of books, and the beautiful libraries designed by Hunt for both these homes are testaments to this passion. These rooms are done up in a grand style, ornately decorated from floor to ceiling, yet they also offer intimacy, inviting readers to take a book in hand and draw up a chair before the fireplace or sit in one of the stuffed chairs scattered around the room. In both libraries, we see the homage paid by wealth to the printed word.
Historic Carnegie Library, built in 1903, Mattoon, Illinois. (Eddie J. Rodriquez/Shutterstock)
At Home With Books
Most of us who are booklovers visit these magnificent private libraries and others like them, and come away with mixed emotions: happy to find books so revered, overwhelmed by the setting in which these jewels of paper and print have been placed, and perhaps a little envious. We return to our own homes, an apartment so small that our books are stacked on tables or kitchen counters, or to a house where shelves are scattered willy-nilly room to room. We may let out a sigh of longing, thinking that if we possessed a library like the one at Biltmore, we could spend every free moment in that room and never become bored.
But in one important way our collection is unique. The books lined up on our shelves or standing on the floor in the corner of the bedroom are mirrors of who we are. That volume of “The Best Loved Poems of the American People” may mean little to a visitor, but when we turn the pages, we remember our mother reading from it to us when we were children. Mark Helprin’s novel “A Soldier of the Great War” gave strength to our hearts during a desperate time, and we remember and honor its counsel when we pass it by in the den. Some of the Golden Book titles we read to our grandchildren were shared with us decades before by our own grandmothers.
"At Home With Books." Out of print. (Potter Style)
In “At Home With Books: How Booklovers Live With and Care for Their Libraries,” now regrettably out of print, the authors created a lavish feast of photographs from apartments and homes around America inhabited by men and women who treasure books, some of them quite wealthy, others middle-class. In the Introduction we read:
“People continue to make a home for books because books make a home. Book-centered rooms are described as nurturing, a comfort zone, an escape hatch, a place to retreat to for tea and talk, thinking and reading, recapturing memories, regenerating spirit and ideas.”
Whatever the state of your own home library—messy and cluttered, tidy and ordered, a spacious getaway room with a Persian rug and some fine works of art, or a single easy chair surrounded by shelves and stacks of books—just remember this:
It’s the books that count. All the rest is just the whipped cream on the dessert.
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make The Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.
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