William Rainey Harper Library

William Rainey Harper Memorial Library is designed to meet general library needs of undergraduates as well as to facilitate general browsing. Its collections cover a wide range of subjects in the social sciences and humanities, as well as in the nontechnical sciences. During library hours, Harper provides access to Academic Information Technologies' USITE terminal in Wieboldt 310 (702-7894). The Library's Storage Collection of infrequently used material from the research collections is paged and circulated at Harper Library.

Harper Library occupies the third floors of the William Rainey Harper Memorial Library building and the Harold Leonard Stuart Hall. It provides comfortable and convenient reading rooms, a general book collection, general reference service, and several other services and facilities.

The Building and the Reading Rooms

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.