Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Interesting facts
- Gordon Bunshaft said the idea for the glowing marble walls came from alabaster he had seen in a bathhouse of Istanbul's Dolmabahçe Palace, which he took for onyx.
- After an infestation of death-watch beetles in 1977, the library pioneered killing book pests by deep-freezing volumes for three days, a method now standard in rare book collections.
- In 2005 a well-known map dealer was caught slicing maps out of rare books when he dropped his hidden craft blade on the reading room floor.
- The whole stone shell is carried by just four corner piers, each anchored by steel pylons driven about 15 metres down to bedrock.
- If fire is detected, the glass book tower can be flooded with fire-suppressing gas; an older carbon dioxide system was removed because it endangered staff.
- The Beinecke's glass-encased stack inspired the glass tower that displays King George III's library at the heart of the British Library in London.
- Its holdings run to roughly a million volumes and several million manuscripts, spanning ancient papyri from Oxyrhynchus to the Romanov family's photo albums.
- The Elizabethan Club collection kept here includes the first four folio editions of Shakespeare's plays.
- Almost 10,000 research visits are made each year, and nearly half come from scholars with no formal connection to Yale.
- The marble came from quarries at Danby, Vermont, and the hexagonal frames holding each panel are of Vermont Woodbury granite.
Why it is worth it
From outside, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library looks like a sealed stone box: a windowless block of pale panels set in a stone grid. The trick is revealed only indoors. The panels are thin slabs of veined Vermont marble, milled to about 1.25 inches, and in daylight they glow a warm amber, lighting the interior like lantern paper while keeping direct sun away from fragile pages. Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed it, and it opened on Yale's Hewitt Quadrangle in October 1963, the gift of Edwin and Frederick W. Beinecke and Johanna Weigle, widow of their brother Walter.
The building's proportions follow a simple 1:2:3 ratio of height to width to length. At its heart rises a six-storey glass tower of books holding some 180,000 volumes, enclosed in glass like a jewel case; far larger stacks run underground and hold more than a million volumes. Beside the building, a sunken courtyard contains Isamu Noguchi's marble garden — a pyramid, a disc and a cube balanced on one corner — intended as symbols of time, the sun and chance.
What the stone protects is extraordinary. The library holds one of the 48 surviving copies of the Gutenberg Bible, two copies of Audubon's double-elephant-folio Birds of America, more than 3,100 incunabula, and the Voynich Manuscript, the illustrated codex in an unknown script that has resisted every attempt at decipherment. The exhibition cases can be viewed without research credentials; the reading room itself is reserved for researchers.
Getting there
The library stands in the middle of Yale's campus in New Haven, Connecticut, less than half a kilometre from the city centre. The nearest airport is Tweed New Haven Airport (HVN), about 6 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library is the rare book library and literary archive of Yale University Library in New Haven, Connecticut. It is one of the largest buildings in the world dedicated to rare books and manuscripts and is one of the largest collections of such texts. Established by a gift of the Beinecke family and given its own financial endowment, the library is financially independent from the university and is co-governed by Yale University Library and Yale Corporation.
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