Widener Library
The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, housing some 3.5million books, is the centerpiece of the Harvard Library system. It honors 1907 Harvard College graduate and book collector Harry Elkins Widener, and was built by his mother Eleanor Elkins Widener soon after his death in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
Widener's "vast and cavernous" stacks hold works in more than one hundred languages which together comprise "one of the world's most comprehensive research collections in the humanities and social sciences." Its of shelves, along five miles of aisles on ten levels, comprise a "labyrinth" which one student "could not enter without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle."
At the building's heart are the Widener Memorial Rooms, displaying papers and mementos recalling the life and death of Harry Widener, as well as the Harry Elkins Widener Collection,
"the precious group of rare and wonderfully interesting books brought together by Mr. Widener",
to which was later added one of the few perfect Gutenberg Biblesthe object of a 1969 burglary attempt conjectured by Harvard's police chief to have been inspired by the 1964 heist film Topkapi.
Background, conception and gift
Predecessor
By the opening of the twentieth century alarms had been issuing for many years about Harvard's "disgracefully inadequate"library, Gore Hall, completed in 1841
and declared full in 1863.
Harvard Librarian Justin Winsor concluded his 1892 Annual Report by pleading, "";
his successor Archibald Cary Coolidge asserted that the Boston Public Library was a better place to write an thesis.
Despite substantial additions in 1876 and 1907,
in 1910 a committee of architects termed Gore Hall
With university librarian William Coolidge Lane reporting that the building's light switches were delivering electric shocks to his staff,
and dormitory basements pressed into service as overflow storage
for Harvard's 543,000 books,
the committee drew up a proposal for replacement of Gore in stages. Andrew Carnegie was approached for financing without success.
Death of Harry Widener
On April 15, 1912, Harry Elkins Widenerscion of two of the wealthiest families in America, a 1907 graduate of Harvard College, and an accomplished bibliophile despite his youthdiedin the sinking of the Titanic.
His father George Dunton Widener also perished, but his mother Eleanor Elkins Widener survived.
Harry Widener's will instructed that his mother, when "in her judgment Harvard University shall make arrangements for properly caring for my collection of books... shall give them to said University to be known as the Harry Elkins Widener Collection",
and he had told a friend, not long before he died, "I want to be remembered in connection with a great library, I do not see how it is going to be brought about."
To enable the fulfillment of her son's wishes Eleanor Widener briefly considered funding an addition to Gore Hall, but soon determined to build instead a completely new and far larger library building"a perpetual memorial"
to Harry Widener, housing not only his personal book collection but Harvard's general library as well,
with room for growth.
As Biel has written, "The committee's Beaux Arts design , with its massiveness and symmetry, offered monumentality with nothing more particular to monumentalize than the aspirations of the modern university"until the Titanic sank and "through delicate negotiation, convinced Eleanor Widener that the most eloquent tribute to Harry would be an entire library rather than a rare book wing."
Terms and cost of gift
To her gift Eleanor Widener attached a number of stipulations,including that the project's architects be the firm of Horace Trumbauer& Associates,
which had built several mansions for both the Elkins and the Widener families.
"Mrs. Widener does not give the University the money to build a new library, but has offered to build a library satisfactory in external appearance to herself," Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell wrote privately.
"The exterior was her own choice, and she has decided architectural opinions."
Harvard historian William Bentinck-Smith has written that
File:GoreHallHarvard UnderDemolition early1913 cropped.jpg|thumb|right|upright=1.5|link=File:GoreHallHarvard_UnderDemolition_early1913.jpg
Though Harvard awarded Trumbauer an honorary degree on the day of the new library's dedication,
it was Trumbauer associate Julian F. Abele who had overall responsibility for the building's design,
which largely followed the 1910 architects' committee's outline.
After Gore Hall was demolished to make way, ground was broken on February12, 1913, and the cornerstone laid June16.
By later that year some 50,000 bricks were being laid each day.
Building
At Harvard's "geographical and intellectual heart"directly across Tercentenary Theatre from Memorial Church,
Widener Library is a hollow rectangle of "Harvard brick with Indiana limestone traceries",
250 by 200 by 80feet high
and enclosing 320,000 square feet,
"colonnaded on its front by immense pillars with elaborate Capital #corinthian capital|, all of which stand at the head of a flight of stairs that would not disgrace the capitol in Washington."
Sources describe the building's style as
Beaux-Arts,
Georgian, Hellenistic,
or "the austere, formalistic Imperial style displayed in the Law School's Langdell Hall and the Medical School Quadrangle".
The east, south, and west wings house the stacks, while the north contains administrative offices and various reading rooms, including the Main Reading Room which, spanning the entire front of the building and some 42feet in both depth and height, was termed by architectural historian Bainbridge Bunting "the most ostentatious interior space at Harvard."
A topmost floor, supported by the stacks framework itself, contains thirty-two rooms for special collections, studies, offices, and seminars.
The Memorial Rooms are in the building's center, between what were originally two light courts now enclosed as additional reading rooms.
Dedication
The building was dedicated immediately after Commencement Day exercises on June24, 1915.Lowell and Coolidge mounted the steps to the main door, where Eleanor Widener presented them with the building's keys.
The first book formally brought into the new library was the 1634 edition of John Downame's The Christian Warfare Against the Devil, World, and Flesh,
believed to be the only volume, of those bequeathed to the school by John Harvard in 1638, to have survived the 1764 burning of Harvard Hall.
In the Memorial Rooms, after a benediction by Bishop William Lawrence, a portrait of Harry Widener
was unveiled, then remarks delivered by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and Lowell.
Afterward "the doors were thrown open, and both graduates and undergraduates had an opportunity to see the beauties and utilities of this important university acquisition."
"I hope it will become the heart of the University," Eleanor Widener said, "a centre for all the interests that make Harvard a great university."
Widener Memorial Rooms
The central Memorial Roomsan outer rotunda housing memorabilia of the life and death of Harry Widener, and an inner library displaying the 3300 rare books collected by himwere described by the Boston Sunday Herald soon after the dedication:Conversely, "even from the very entrance one will catch a glimpse in the distance of the portrait of young Harry Widener on the further wall , if the intervening doors happen to be open."
For many years Eleanor Widener hosted Commencement Day luncheons in the Memorial Rooms.
The family underwrites their upkeep,
including weekly renewal of the flowersoriginally roses but now carnations.
Amenities and deficiencies
Touted as "the last word in library construction",the new building's amenities included telephones, pneumatic tubes, book lifts and conveyors, elevators,
and a dining-room and kitchenette "for the ladies of the staff".
Advertisements for the manufacturer of the building's shelving highlighted its "dark brown enamel finish, harmonizing with oak trim",
and special interchangeable regular and oversize shelves meant that books on a given subject could be shelved together regardless of size.
The Library Journal found "especially interesting not so much the spacious and lofty reading rooms" as the innovation of placing student carrels and private faculty studies directly in the stack, reflecting Lowell's desire to put "the massive resources of the stack close to the scholar's hand, reuniting books and readers in an intimacy that nineteenth-century had long precluded".
Nonetheless, certain deficiencies were soon noted.
A primitive form of air conditioning was abandoned within a few months.
"The need of better toilet facilities has been pressed upon us during the past year by several rather distressing experiences," Widener Superintendent Frank Carney wrote discreetly in 1918.
And after a university-wide search for castoff furniture left many of the stacks' 300 carrels still unequipped, Coolidge wrote to "There is something rather humiliating in having to proclaim to the world that unequalled opportunity to the scholar and investigator who wishes to come here, but that in order to use these opportunities he must bring his own chair, table and electric lamp."
Later-built tunnels, from the stacks level furthest underground, connect to nearby Pusey Library, Lamont Library,
and Houghton Library.
An enclosed bridge connecting to Houghton's reading room via a Widener windowbuilt after Eleanor Widener's heirs agreed to waive her gift's proscription of exterior additions or alterationswas removed in 2004.
Houghton and Lamont were built in the 1940s to relieve Widener,
which had become simultaneously too smallits shelves were fulland too largeits immense size
and complex catalog made books difficult to locate.
But with Harvard's collections doubling every 17 years, by 1965 Widener was again close to full,
prompting construction of Pusey, and in the early 1980s library officials "pushed the panic button" again, leading to the construction of the Harvard Depository in 1986.