Harper Library closed June 12 and will reopen in September under the auspices of the College as the Harper Memorial Library College Learning Center, a 24-hour study and group collaboration space operating from Sundays to Fridays. The Harper Library book collections were moved to Regenstein's A-level the week of June 15. Please return books to the Regenstein, Crerar, D'Angelo Law, Eckhart or SSA libraries. For additional information, see the Spring issue of Libra.
Items in On-campus Storage (formerly Harper Storage) will continue to be paged daily Monday through Friday for pickup at Regenstein Library.
Harper Library occupies the third floors of the William Rainey Harper Memorial Library building and the Harold Leonard Stuart Hall.
The William Rainey Harper Memorial Building was planned in 1910 as the central building for the main quadrangle, to house the General Library's offices and research collections, and to commemorate the first president of the University. In 1970, the General Library was moved to its new building, the Joseph Regenstein Library, and Harper was transformed into the College Center. It now contains faculty and administrative offices for the undergraduate College, seminar rooms, and lecture halls.
Architecturally, the Harper Memorial has been described as English Gothic of the collegiate type, inspired by the examples of King's College Chapel in Cambridge, and Magdalen College and Christ Church at Oxford. Some of its more interesting features are the two towers that climb to 135 feet and the stone carvings that abound on the exterior and in the Harper Reading Room. This reading room with its 39-foot-high ceiling is considered one of the most beautiful rooms on campus.
Noteworthy carvings in the Harper Reading Room include the coat of arms of eight American universities (Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Michigan, Wisconsin, California, and Chicago) on the screen at the west end, and eight foreign universities (Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Bologna, Tokyo, and Calcutta) on the screen at the east end.
Above the screens are carved the inscriptions, "Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider" and "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning." Marks of eight famous early printers (Isaac Elzevir, William Caxton, Johannes Columbius, Henning Grosse, Guillaume Rouille, Thomas Vantrollier and John Norton, Theodosious Rihelius, and Aldus Manutius) ornament the corbels supporting the ceiling arches. The University's coat of arms and the Harper Memorial Library monogram, "HML," are repeated in the ceiling.
Portraits of William Rainey Harper and of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the University, hang at the east end of the Harper Reading Room. Portraits of James Rowland Angell and Nobel laureate Albert Abraham Michelson, first heads of the psychology and physics departments under Harper, hang at the west end. The stained glass window on the south facade is a memorial to Henry Dewitt Burton, who chaired the commission that designed the building, was the first Director of Libraries at the University, and became the University's third president. Sinsui Igarashi's portrait of Abraham Lincoln, presented by Juigi George Kasai on the occasion of his 50th Class Reunion in 1963, hangs in the West Tower Reading Room.
Harper Library's North Reading Room is actually the third floor of Stuart Hall, a building that was originally constructed for the University's Law School. The President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, laid its cornerstone in 1903. This room is also English Gothic in style, with a 35-foot-high ceiling ornamented by heavy carved wooden trusses.
