Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/136

132 opportunities for the designer. Aside from the benefactions of Mr. Carnegie, which are in some respects the most striking event of the past ten years, literally scores of small buildings have been erected by private individuals and by towns. These are coming to form an architectural type fully as distinct as the large buildings. As a rule, of late years these smaller library buildings have taken the shape of a rectangular structure with a central hall, two large front rooms, a delivery desk across the hall and shelves in 'stacks' in the rear on the main floor. A second story usually provides space for additional study and administration rooms. A very large number of memorial libraries of this general type have been erected, particularly in New England. Numerous local and individual variations occur, but a building designed to shelve some ten thousand books so as to be easily reached by any visitor and to afford one attendant a fair view of the main floor has become the accepted type of the small library.

In 1893 there were but three examples of modern library buildings of a size much above the ordinary to be seen in America. These were the Boston Public Library, the Library of Cornell University and the Newberry Library of Chicago. All these are dignified and imposing structures, while the Boston edifice is distinctly one of the foremost public buildings of the country. No one of these buildings has ever satisfied librarians as an ideal, despite their abundant merits. In the past decade a round dozen structures have been reared, which undoubtedly rank as of the first order for size and cost. They are the Library of Congress, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, the Public Libraries of Chicago, Milwaukee, Providence, Newark and the District of Columbia, and the libraries of Columbia, Princeton, New York and Illinois Universities, together with that of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. Each of these buildings is in itself a notable production; as a group they form a striking testimony to the extent and vitality of the library 'movement' in this country. None of them is without individuality. The reading room of the Library of Congress, the rotunda and impressive south façade of the Columbia Library, the Hall of Fame at the rear of the New York University Library, are characteristic features known to all readers of the illustrated papers. The others offer even more interesting and valuable returns to the student of our architecture and of library problems. The university libraries and that of the Wisconsin Historical Society in particular will repay the most careful examination.

It has been a decade of building, and the end is not yet. The New York Public Library's building now in process of erection is but the largest of scores either planned or under way. For most of this expansion Mr. Carnegie is responsible. There seems to be no limit to his generosity, and with very few exceptions, the money he has given