Bapst Library, Boston College

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Built in 1928, Bapst’s second-floor reading room shows off traditional elements of a gorgeous library: soaring arches and stained-glass windows, each devoted to a different academic discipline. The Collegiate Gothic design includes a memorial tower at its north end. Above the central doors of the main entrance is a sculpture of Mary, Seat of Wisdom, flanked by prophets, and the library name honors BC’s first president, John Bapst, a Jesuit missionary who came to the U.S. from Switzerland.

 

Clark Library, University of California at Los Angeles

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 Twelve miles east of campus in the West Adams district near downtown L.A., this rare-book library is somewhat of a hidden gem. Built as the private library of the founder of the L.A. Philharmonic, it displays the world’s largest collection of books by and about Oscar Wilde and, among other things, important editions of Shakespeare. The fabulous 1926-built Italian Baroque interior of wood-paneled walls, murals, and fireplaces is the setting for Sunday afternoon chamber music concerts by the likes of the Leipzig String Quartet.

 

Joe and Rika MansuetoLibrary, University of Chicago

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Architect Helmut Jahn topped off this year-old library (which goes five stories underground) with an elliptical glass dome that lets in ample sunlight. The strikingly modern 8,000-square-foot reading room is outfitted with study tables and chairs made from European white oak. The automated storage and retrieval system (which has the capacity to handle 3.5 million volumes) delivers a book in an average of five minutes.

Suzzallo Library, University of Washington, Seattle

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Moses, Shakespeare, Plato, Darwin, and Benjamin Franklin are among the 18 terracotta figures—chosen by faculty in 1923—that watch over those studying in this sandstone library. The main reading room is majestic and churchlike, with a high vaulted ceiling, stained glass, and hanging light fixtures. Oak bookcases are topped with hand-carved friezes that represent native plants of Washington State, such as Douglas fir, dogwood, and rhododendron. At each end hangs a hand-painted world globe bearing the name of an explorer.

 

Linderman Library, Lehigh University, PA

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A recent renovation to this library painstakingly refreshed the Victorian stained-glass rotunda and grand reading room—to the point that 14 different shades of gold paint were tried before one was selected as a match for the original hue on the reading room’s carved ceiling. The result is a gleaming, worthy home for rare books like Darwin’s Origin of Species and John James Audubon’s four-volume elephant folio edition of Birds of America.

 

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT

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Panes of 1.25-inch-thick marble give the 1960s-era Beinecke a distinctive look. White and gray from the outside, the marble glows a warm amber-like hue on the interior, allowing filtered light to enter the space without damaging the rare contents, which range from ancient papyri to works by great 20th-century writers. A giant six-story tower of books is encased in glass and surrounded by a mezzanine level that draws visitors to free rotating exhibitions, lectures by preeminent thinkers, and musical performances. The Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed from movable type, and Audubon’s Birds of America are on permanent exhibition.

 

Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University, Waco, TX

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This Italian Renaissance–style building’s bronze doors—fashioned after those at St. John’s Baptistry in Florence—lead you into a foyer with a 23-carat gold-leaf dome. Look through the library for the 62 stained-glass windows that illustrate the works of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Victorian poets who make up the focus of the research library’s collection. It began as the personal trove of Dr. A. J. Armstrong, head of the English department from 1912 to 1952. These days, the Hankamer Treasure Room (pictured) hosts lectures and string quartets.  

University of Michigan Law Library, Ann Arbor

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Considered the largest building dedicated exclusively to a law library in the world, this 1931-built Gothic gem sets some context with quotes from great jurists above its entrance. The gloriously renovated reading room has a 50-foot vaulted cathedral ceiling, stained-glass windows, oak wainscoting, and cork floors for quiet passage. A three-story underground glass addition was built between 1978 and 1981, adding some 77,000 square feet in space, shelving for up to 475,000 volumes, and a rare-book room.

 

Fleet Library, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence 

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Having outgrown its library, the Rhode Island School of Design had been in search of a new site for more than a decade when FleetBoston Financial Corporation donated this Italian Renaissance–style bank building in 2002—complete with barrel-vaulted ceiling, marble columns, and an opulent clock. Built in 1917, the historic space was adapted with contemporary features (Knoll chairs, cork flooring) to house its collection of architecture, design, and photography books in a living-room-like space, especially convenient for students living in the dorms upstairs.
 
Davis Family Library, Middlebury College, VT
 
 
New York–based Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman & Associates Architects strategically chose a wide (rather than vertical) design to help this 143,000-square-foot, LEED-certified library blend into the pastoral surroundings. Opened in 2004, the library even brings the outside in, using wood harvested from Middlebury’s Bread Loaf campus forest in nearby Ripton for most of the stacks, carrels, and reading tables. Linoleum, rather than plastic or vinyl, was used for counter and carrel surfaces, and the carpet is made entirely of recycled fibers.
 
 
 
 
Andrew Dickson White Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY   
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Within Cornell’s main library building, this intimate space makes a dramatic impression with three tiers of wrought-iron stacks. Andrew Dickson White was the university’s co-founder and first president, and he donated his diverse 30,000-book collection, which included volumes on everything from architecture and witchcraft to the French Revolution and Civil War. The room also displays art, artifacts, and furniture from White’s diplomatic career stationed in Germany and later Russia.
 
George Peabody Library, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore 
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Once described as a cathedral of books, the Peabody Stack Room features an atrium with black-and-white marble floor and five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies, which rise to 61 feet up to a latticed skylight ceiling. The library was founded by its namesake philanthropist in 1857, and its 300,000-volume collection is strong on religion, British art, Romance languages and literature, as well as geography.
 
Frederick Ferris Thompson Memorial Library, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 
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A majestic façade of Germantown stone trimmed in ornately carved Indiana limestone opens into one of Vassar’s most memorable spaces. The massive stained-glass Cornaro Window illuminates the library’s main hall; it portrays Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, the first woman ever to receive a doctorate, defending her thesis before the scholars of Padua. Her garb of gray and rose satin, the college’s original colors, symbolizes the rise of women’s higher education at Vassar.
 
 

Riggs Library, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.

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The university’s main library from 1891 to 1970, Riggs is no longer open regularly to students, but some get the treat of attending an event, dinner, or lecture in this elegant space (it easily outshines its workaday replacement, Lauinger Library). Designed by architect Paul Pelz—also behind the Library of Congress—Riggs is one of the few remaining cast-iron libraries and still stocks 35,000 volumes. Guests have included King Abdullah II of Jordan; Ben Bradlee, vice president ofThe Washington Post; First Lady Michelle Obama; and His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales.

 

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