Area 4 acres (1.6 ha) Architect Platt, Charles Adams | Built 1924 (1924)-1929 Architectural style Georgian Revival | |
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Location 1408 W. Gregory Dr., Urbana, Illinois MPS University of Illinois Buildings designed by Charles A. Platt MPS | ||
The Main Library is a historic library on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in Urbana, Illinois. Built in 1924, the library was the third built for the school; it replaced Altgeld Hall, which had become too small for the university's collections. Architect Charles A. Platt designed the Georgian Revival building, one of several on the campus which he designed in the style. The red brick building features a three-bay main entrance with limestone archways and a green slate roof with a series of eleven dormers and four tall chimneys. The library's interior was decorated with 27 stained glass windows showing Renaissance printer's marks and four murals. The library was purposely built away from the center of campus, a break from traditional campus planning, in order to allow the building to expand; this proved necessary, as three bookstack additions have been placed on the building. The building houses several area libraries, as well as the University Archives and The Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
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The library was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 11, 2000.
History
In 1868, the University’s first president, John Milton Gregory, personally acquired 644 volumes to establish the library. By 1880, the library housed 12,500 volumes, and by the turn of the century, some 70,000 volumes. Three decades later, Edmund Janes James—another bibliophilic president—could boast of a library of over one million volumes. At over thirteen million volumes today, the University of Illinois is the second largest university library collection in the United States.
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library
The Rare Book & Manuscript Library within the Main Library building is one of the largest special collections repositories in the United States. Its collections, consisting of over half a million volumes and three kilometers of manuscript material, encompass the broad areas of literature, history, art, theology, philosophy, technology and the natural sciences, and include large collections of emblem books, writings of and works about John Milton, and authors' personal papers.
History
From the founding of the University Library into the twentieth century, rare materials were housed within the main stacks. Professor Harris F. Fletcher, a member of the English faculty from 1926 to 1962, advised the library on the purchase of books by and about John Milton, often assisting during his own visits to England. In 1937, the Library decided to designate a small space on the fourth floor ("The Seventeenth Century Room") to house Fletcher's collection of approximately 5,700 volumes. In 1966, the Rare Book & Manuscript library acquired the large personal collection of Professor and Shakespeare scholar Thomas W. Baldwin, with strong holdings in Renaissance pedagogy, literature, drama, history, and politics in an attempt to collect books that Shakespeare and his contemporaries might have read in their lifetimes. As a result of these and other acquisitions, the library is a significant repository of English imprints from the 16th to 19th centuries and incunabula, including numerous items from the New Haven firm of C. A. Stonehill. The library also began collecting incunabula; by 1950, its collection of pre-1501 imprints numbered nearly 400.
The library developed some of its specialties following specific major acquisitions. An elephant folio of Audubon’s Birds of America (1826–38) is the centerpiece of substantial ornithological holdings. The library acquired 82 cubic feet of H. G. Wells manuscripts in 1954 and has since added numerous related items and small collections to its Wells holdings. The RBML also holds a large collection of Marcel Proust correspondence, comprised in part of materials collected by professor-collector Philip Kolb; the current Proust collection includes over 1,100 holographic items, as well as additional resources for research on Proust and his contemporaries.
Under the leadership of Robert B. Downs (1958-1974), the University Library began identifying rare titles throughout the general stacks and subject libraries, bringing them together in a new, larger space designated the Rare Book Room. Downs actively sought to enlarge the library's holdings in its areas of strength and to develop new areas of interest. During his tenure, the library acquired numerous major collections, including the Lloyd Francis Nickell collection of eighteenth-century English literature (2,000 volumes), the Ewin Cannon Baskette collection on freedom of expression (10,000 items); the Spanish Civil War collection; the Marvin T. Herrick collection of Italian plays from 1500 to 1700 (500 items), the Jacob Hollander collection of economic history (4,470 items); the Franklin J. Meine collection of Mark Twain (2,100 items); the Yamagiwa collection of Japanese illustrated books (1,800 items); the Harwell collection of Confederate imprints and sheet music (2,500 items), and a large group of Carl Sandburg papers. By the end of Downs’s career, the Rare Book Room had moved from its fourth-floor location to the library's west wing, where the RBML remains today.