Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. The building, designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft, of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, is the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books and manuscripts. It is built at the center of the University, in Hewitt Quadrangle, which is more commonly referred to as "Beinecke Plaza". A six-story above-ground tower of book stacks is surrounded by a windowless rectangular building with walls made of translucent Vermont marble, which transmit subdued lighting and provide protection from direct light. Three floors of stacks extend under Hewitt Quadrangle. The sculptures in the sunken courtyard are by Isamu Noguchi and are said to represent time (the pyramid); sun - (the circle); and chance - (the cube). The library also contains an exhibition hall that, among other things, displays one of the 40 existent copies of the Gutenberg Bible, study areas, reading rooms, the catalogue room, microfilm room, offices, and the book storage areas. This article is about the institution of higher learning in the United States. ... Gordon Bunshaft (May 9, 1909–August 6, 1990) was a 20th century architect educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ... The architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP (SOM) was formed in Chicago in 1936 by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings; in 1939 they were joined by John Merrill. ... Marble This page is about the metamorphic rock. ... Black Slide mantra, in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. ... The Gutenberg bible owned by the US Library of Congress The Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible) is a print of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible that was printed by its namesake, Johann Gutenberg, in Mainz, Germany using moveable type, mass-produced starting on February... Microfilm is an analog storage medium for books, periodicals, legal documents and engineering drawings. ...

During the 1960s, Claes Oldenburg's sculpture "Lipstick on a Caterpillar Track" was displayed in Beinecke Plaza, although it is now displayed in Morse College. Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around the world. ... Soft Bathtub (Model)—Ghost Version by Claes Oldenburg 1966, acryllic and pencil on foam-filled canvas with wood, cord, and plaster. ... Morse College is a residential college at Yale University, built in 1961 by Eero Saarinen. ...

History

In the late 19th century the rarer and more valuable books of the Library of Yale College were placed on special shelving at the Old Library (now Dwight Hall). These were moved to the Rare Book Room collection of Sterling Memorial Library when it opened in 1930. When the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library opened its doors on October 14, 1963, it had become the home of the volumes from the Sterling Memorial Library Rare Book Room, and three special collections--the Collection of American Literature, the Collection of Western Americana, and the Collection of German Literature. Shortly afterward, they were joined by the James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection. Beinecke Library became the repository for books in the Yale collection printed anywhere before 1601, books printed in Latin America before 1751, books printed in North America before 1821, newspapers and broadsides printed in the United States before 1851, European tracts and pamphlets printed before 1801, and Slavic, East European, Near and Middle Eastern books through the eighteenth century, as well as special books outside these categories. Sterling Memorial Library is the largest library at Yale University, containing over 4 million volumes in over 15 floors. ... October 14 is the 287th day of the year (288th in Leap years). ... 1963 was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will take you to calendar). ...

Special collections

The holdings of the Beinecke Library include

• American Children's Literature
• John James Audubon (including two copies of the double elephant folio of Birds of America)
• James M. Barrie
• John Baskerville
• William Thomas Beckford
• Sir John Betjeman
• John Boswell
• Bryher
• Cartography, including the "Vinland Map"
• Ernst Cassirer
• Congregationalism
• Joseph Conrad
• Walter Crane
• Dada
• Daniel Defoe
• Charles Dickens
• Norman Douglas
• Jonathan Edwards
• George Eliot
• the Elizabethan Club collection (composed of about 300 volumes of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, including the first four folios of Shakespeare, the Huth Shakespeare quartos, and first or early quartos of all the major dramatists)
• Erasmus and his contemporaries
• Faust
• Henry Fielding
• Benjamin Franklin
• Goethe
• Greek and Latin Literature
• Thomas Hardy
• Humanism
• Incunabula (over 3100 volumes including the Melk copy of the Gutenberg Bible)
• the James Weldon Johnson Collection
• James Joyce
• Judaica
• Rudyard Kipling
• D. H. Lawrence
• Doris Lessing
• pre-1660 manuscripts (including more than 1,100 medieval and Renaissance codices and several hundred manuscript fragments dating from the fourth century through the Renaissance, as well as the Voynich Manuscript)
• Thomas Mann
• John Masefield
• the Mellon Collection of Alchemy and the Occult
• George Meredith
• Ornithology
• the Papyrus Collection
• Playing Cards
• Polish Literature
• Dorothy Richardson
• Rilke
• Rochambeau Family
• Bruce Rogers
• the Romanov Family
• John Ruskin
• Russian Literature
• Schiller
• Sixteenth-Century Printed Books
• Sporting Books
• the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Collection
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Alexis de Tocqueville
• Vanderbilt Collection
• Rebecca West
• the Thornton Wilder papers
• Kurt Wolff.

John James Audubon John James Audubon1 (April 26, 1785 – January 27, 1851) was an American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. ... Sir James Matthew Barrie, Bt. ... John Baskerville (January 28, 1706 - January 8, 1775) was a printer in Birmingham, and an associate of some of the members of the Lunar Society. ... Fonthill Abbey designed for William Beckford by the architect James Wyatt William Thomas Beckford (October 1, 1760-May 2, 1844) was an English novelist, art critic, travel writer and politician. ... Sir John Betjeman (28 August 1906 – 19 May 1984) was a British poet and writer on architecture. ... John Eastburn Boswell (March 20, 1947 - December 24, 1994), a gay historian, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and educated at the College of William and Mary and at Harvard University. ... Bryher (1894-1983) was the pen name of Annie Winnifred Ellerman. ... Cartography or mapmaking (in Greek chartis = map and graphein = write) is the study and practice of making maps or globes. ... the Vinland map The Vinland map is purportedly a 15th century map of the world, redrawn from a 13th century original. ... Ernst Cassirer (July 28, 1874 - April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. ... Congregational churches are Protestant Christian churches practicing congregationalist church governance, in which each congregation indepedently and autonomously runs its own affairs. ... Joseph Conrad Joseph Conrad (December 3, 1857 – August 3, 1924) was a Polish-born British novelist. ... Walter Crane (August 15, 1845 - March 14, 1915) was a significant English artist. ... Dadaism or Dada is a post-World War I cultural movement in visual art as well as literature (mainly poetry), theatre and graphic design. ... Daniel Defoe Daniel Defoe ( 1660 – April 24, 1731) was an English writer and journalist, who first gained fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. ... Charles Dickens used his rich imagination, sense of humour and detailed memories, particularly of his childhood, to enliven his fiction. ... George Norman Douglas (December 8, 1868 - February 7, 1952) was a British writer, now best known for his 1917 novel South Wind. ... Jonathan Edwards (October 5, 1703- March 22, 1758) was a colonial American Congregational preacher and theologian. ... George Eliot Mary Ann Evans, better known by the pen name George Eliot (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), was an English novelist. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... Erasmus Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (also Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam) (October 27, probably 1466 – July 12, 1536) was a Dutch humanist and theologian. ... Faust is the protagonist of a popular German tale that has been used as the basis for many different fictional works. ... Henry Fielding (April 22, 1707 - October 8, 1754) was a British novelist and dramatist. ... Benjamin Franklin by Jean-Baptiste Greuze 1777 For the former mayor of Nepean, see Ben Franklin (politician) Dr. Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 – April 17, 1790) was an American printer, journalist, publisher, author, philanthropist, abolitionist, public servant, scientist, librarian, diplomat, and inventor. ... Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (pronounced [gø tə]) (August 28, 1749 – March 22, 1832) was a German writer, humanist, scientist, and philosopher. ... Photograph of Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was a novelist and poet, generally regarded as one of the greatest figures in English literature. ... Humanism is a general term for many different lines of thought which focus on common solutions to common human issues. ... A page from a rare Blackletter Bible (1497) printed in Strassburg by J.R.Grueninger. ... Melk seen from the abbey Stift Melk Melk (older spelling: Mölk) is a city of Austria, in the federal state of Lower Austria, next to the Wachau valley along the Danube. ... The Gutenberg bible owned by the US Library of Congress The Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible) is a print of the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible that was printed by its namesake, Johann Gutenberg, in Mainz, Germany using moveable type, mass-produced starting on February... James Weldon Johnson, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1932 James Weldon Johnson (June 17, 1871 - June 26, 1938) was a leading African American author, poet, early civil rights activist, and prominent figure in the Harlem Renaissance. ... James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (February 2, 1882 – January 13, 1941) was an expatriate Irish writer and poet, and is widely considered one of the most significant writers of the 20th century. ... For a discussion of Jews as an ethnicity or ethnic group see the article on Jew. ... Rudyard Kipling, British author Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) was a British author and poet, born in India. ... D. H. Lawrence David Herbert Lawrence (11 September 1885 – 2 March 1930) was one of the most important, certainly one of the most controversial, English writers of the 20th century, who wrote novels, short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, and letters. ... Doris Lessing (born October 22, 1919), is a British writer, born Doris May Taylor in Kermanshah, Persia (Iran). ... The Voynich manuscript is written in an unknown script. ... Thomas Mann Paul Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 – August 12, 1955) was a German novelist, philanthropist and essayist, lauded principally for a series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual and an underlying... John Edward Masefield (1 June 1878-12 May 1967), was a British poet and writer, and Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1930 until his death in 1967. ... George Meredith (February 12, 1828 - May 18, 1909) was an English novelist and poet. ... Ornithology (from the Greek ornitha = chicken and logos = word/science) is the branch of biology concerned with the scientific study of birds. ... Poland — Polish literature Writers and novelists Main article: List of Polish language authors Writers in chronological order of birth: Jan Potocki (1761–1815) Józef Ignacy Kraszewski (1812–1887) Eliza Orzeszkowa (1841–1910) Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846–1916) Bolesław Prus (1847–1912) Stefan Żeromski (1864–1925) Władysław Reymont (1867–1925) Zofia Nałkowska... Dorothy Miller Richardson (17 May 1873 - 17 June 1957) was the first writer to publish a novel using what was to become known as the stream-of-consciousness technique. ... Rainer Maria Rilke (born 4 December 1875 in Prague; died 29 December 1926 in Val-Mont (Switzerland)) was an important poet in the German language. ... The House of Romanov (Рома́нов, pronounced Ro-MAH-nof), the second and last imperial dynasty of Russia, which ruled Muscovy and the Russian Empire for five generations from 1613 to 1762. ... Upper: Steel-plate engraving of Ruskin as a young man, made circa 1845?, scanned from print made circa 1895. ... Russian literature refers to the literature of Russia or its émigrés, and to the Russian-language literature of several independent nations once a part of what was historically Russia or the Soviet Union. ... Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (November 10, 1759 – May 9, 1805), usually known as Friedrich Schiller, was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist. ... Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 - July 27, 1946) was an American writer, poet, feminist, playwright, and catalyst in the development of modern art and literature, who spent most of her life in France. ... Alice B. Toklas, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1949 Alice Babette Toklas (April 30, 1877 _ March 7, 1967) was the lover of writer Gertrude Stein. ... Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis (Balfour) Stevenson (November 13, 1850 – December 3, 1894), was a novelist, poet, and travel writer. ... For other uses, see Tocqueville (disambiguation) Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (b. ... Dame Rebecca West, DBE was the pseudonym of Cecily (or Cicily) Isabel Fairfield (December 21, 1892- March 15, 1983), a British-Irish feminist and writer famous for her novels and for her relationship with H. G. Wells. ... Thornton Wilder (April 17, 1897 - December 7, 1975) was an American writer. ...

External link

• Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library homepage (http://www.library.yale.edu/beinecke/)