George Peabody Library — library building
Matthew Petroff · CC BY-SA 3.0

George Peabody Library

  • 2 min read
  • 39.297° N 76.615° W

Interesting facts

  • The phrase cathedral of books is credited to the institute's provost Nathaniel H. Morison, who helped shape the building's design.
  • The five tiers of ornamental cast-iron balconies were produced by the Baltimore ironworks Bartlett-Hayward Company.
  • The institute was meant to open in 1860, but the turmoil of the Civil War in the border state of Maryland delayed it until 1866.
  • Its first librarian, John Morris, studied the great libraries of America and Europe and drew up a list of 50,000 books to acquire whatever the effort or cost.
  • Assistant Philip Reese Uhler extended that method to science, asking experts in each field what to buy, an approach later standard in academic libraries.
  • From 1967 to 1982 the library belonged to the City of Baltimore and was run as a department of the Enoch Pratt Free Library.
  • Its treasures include Diderot's 28-volume Encyclopédie, a first edition of Darwin's On the Origin of Species and first editions of Poe and Melville.
  • George Peabody had served in the militia that defended Baltimore against the British attack during the War of 1812.
  • The founding plan also included Peabody Prizes, cash awards with gold medals for the top graduates of Baltimore's public high schools.

Why it is worth it

From the street, the Peabody Institute on Mount Vernon Place looks like a sober Baltimore civic building. Step into the stack room and the scale inverts: a tall, narrow atrium rises 61 feet to a latticed skylight of frosted glass, and the walls on every side are five tiers of black cast-iron balconies, their railings and brackets worked into ornament, lined floor to ceiling with leather spines. It is one of the rooms that people have in mind when they call a library a cathedral of books, and it earns the phrase without any stained glass at all — the light falls straight down through the roof onto a checkerboard marble floor.

The money came from George Peabody, a merchant and banker who became one of the great American philanthropists of his century. In February 1857 he gave $300,000 as the founding sum for an arts and culture institute for the people of Baltimore, one that joined a music conservatory — the first in the country — to a free reference library. The library wing was designed by the architect Edmund G. Lind, working closely with the institute's provost Nathaniel H. Morison, and was completed in 1878.

The architecture is essentially engineering made beautiful. Cast iron allowed thin columns, slender galleries and a great open well of space that masonry could not have given, and Lind let the structure show rather than hide it, dressing it in a restrained neo-Grec vocabulary of rosettes, fluting and fretwork. The collection that fills it — around 300,000 volumes, mostly nineteenth-century reference works, strong in history, architecture, the history of science, exploration and travel — reflects the institute's original ambition to be a scholar's library rather than a lending one.

Since 1982 the building has belonged to Johns Hopkins University and is run as part of its special collections, open for reading and study; the room also doubles as an event venue, and those fees help to support the books. The setting adds to the pleasure: Mount Vernon Place is the grand nineteenth-century square around the city's Washington Monument, and the Peabody's conservatory, still one of the world's notable music schools, carries on next door.

Getting there

The library is at 17 East Mount Vernon Place in the Mount Vernon neighbourhood of Baltimore, less than a kilometre from the city centre. Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport (BWI) is about 14 km to the south.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in the United States 228The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings in the United States 5The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Libraries 6The Most Beautiful Libraries in the United States 7The Most Beautiful Libraries 27The Most Beautiful 19th-Century Buildings 28The Most Beautiful Buildings in the United States 34The Most Beautiful Buildings 286

From the encyclopaedia

The George Peabody Library at Johns Hopkins University, focuses on research into the 19th century. It was formerly the Library of the Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute of music in the City of Baltimore, and it is located on the Peabody campus at West Mount Vernon Place north of downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The collections are available for use by the general public, in keeping with Baltimore merchant and philanthropist George Peabody's goal to create a library "for the free use of all persons who desire to consult it".

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