Gifts of books came in from other friends of the College, and in 1760 a catalog of the library, compiled and published by President Samuel Davies, listed 1,281 volumes. This catalog was in part a fund-raising venture; President Davies indicated in the preface that it was published to provide information for those ``watching for Opportunities of doing Good,'' and to afford ``particular Benefactors the Pleasure of seeing how many others have concurred with them in their favorite charity.'' President Davies also described the Library's purpose -- in eloquent terms that have continued to have meaning for more than two centuries:
``A large and well-sorted Collection of Books on the various Branches of Literature is the most proper and valuable Fund with which [the College] can be endowed. It is one of the best Helps to enrich the Minds both of the Officers and Students with Knowledge; to give them an extensive Acquaintance with Authors; and to lead them beyond the narrow Limits of the Books to which they are confined in their stated Studies and Recitations, that they may expatiate at large thro' the boundless and variegated Fields of Science [i.e., knowledge].''
THE LIBRARY'S MANY HOMES
Over the years the Library has occupied a variety of physical accommodations. When the College moved from Newark to Princeton in 1756, two large boxes of books were sent by water from Newark to New Brunswick and conveyed to a room on the second floor of newly constructed Nassau Hall, which became the College's first library. This historic room suffered the depredation of military occupation in the Revolution, served as the meeting place of the Continental Congress in the summer and fall of 1783, and was almost totally destroyed by the disastrous fire of 1802. Soon after this fire, the Library was reestablished in Stanhope Hall (completed in 1803), its collections now considerably enlarged through generous contributions to replace the losses.
The Library remained in Stanhope Hall until 1860, when it was returned to Nassau Hall, this time to larger quarters in the rear wing (now the Faculty Room), created as a part of the building's restoration following another fire in 1855. Under the dynamic leadership of President McCosh, the College acquired in 1873 its first separate library building, the Chancellor Green Library, donated by John C. Green. This octagonal structure, in most respects admirably functional for a small library, was soon outgrown, and Pyne Library was constructed in 1897, the Sesquicentennial gift of Mrs. Percy Rivington Pyne, mother of M. Taylor Pyne 1877.
When Pyne Library opened, with collections numbering fewer than 200,000 volumes, the need for more space seemed far away. But, by the 1920s it in turn began to be desperately crowded, and plan after plan was developed to relieve the situation. Decades of planning eventually culminated in the Harvey S. Firestone Memorial Library, financed by gifts from 1,250 groups and individuals, the largest single gift coming at a critical time from the Firestone family. in the final stages of planning in 1944, Julian P. Boyd, the librarian, called together representatives of a dozen other universities that were also planning to construct large library buildings as soon as materials became available after the war. This meeting led to the creation of the Cooperative Committee on Library Buildings and to a revolution in college and university library architecture with worldwide influence.
The large university library building erected in the first forty years of the century tended to be a magnificent structure, consisting principally of a large warehouse for books, closed to most students and connected to a cavernous, ill-lighted reading room by an ineffective delivery system. The change that took place following World War II is clearly exhibited in Firestone Library, one of the earliest models of the new architectural thinking. What is important about Firestone is not its exterior shell, vaguely Gothic to harmonize with nearby buildings, but rather its functional interior design, which seeks to bring books and readers together, serving as a scholar's workshop, or as a ``laboratory of the humanities,'' to use the language of the planning period. That this aim has been achieved is indicated by the fact that on a typical mid-week day in the academic year 1974-1975 some 5,000 people passed through its doors to take out books or to use the more than 2,000 study seats dispersed among the stacks and in special function rooms. Flexibility, another goal, was provided for by movable partitions and by spaces designed to serve a variety of purposes. The building has with relative ease been adjusted to changing academic requirements; the exterior walls had by 1971 been penetrated four times for new additions.
While Firestone is the largest library building on the campus and houses nearly all of the Library's administrative functions, the collections have expanded into many buildings. With notable exceptions, the humanities and social sciences are housed in Firestone, and science and technology, with mathematics, are located in the buildings where teaching and research in those disciplines are conducted. These special subject collections plus two small residential area libraries and the annex library for seldom-used volumes occupy space in seventeen buildings. It is, however, essentially one library, with one budget and one administration, dispersed for the convenience of users.
THE BOOK COLLECTIONS
From the beginning, the growth of the collections has depended heavily upon gifts. The largest of the early endowed funds, the Elizabeth Foundation for ``the purchase of rare and valuable books needed for the purposes of research and study by literary and learned men,'' was created by a gift of John C. Green in 1868. Starting in 1875 and continuing through recent years, a steady source of support has been endowed funds for the purchase of books established by alumni classes. Of the $1,633,000 spent for acquisitions in 1973-1974, almost half came from the income of 200 Library endowed funds, with a book value of more than $11 million, or from gifts and grants of which the principal could be spent. In addition, there were gifts of books and manuscripts with an appraised value of $436,475.
Gifts of rare books and manuscripts have been particularly important in creating those collections of unique and almost irreplaceable materials which are the special distinction of a great research library. The first major collection on a single subject was the Civil War collection of John S. Pierson of the Class of 1840, which grew to more than 5,000 volumes between 1873 and the donor's death in 1908. Other important gifts followed in the next decades, but not until the 1930s did the frequency of the gifts and the cumulative effect begin to produce a rich and varied collection of rare books and manuscripts.
The gifts of Robert Garrett laid the foundation of one of the five best collections of medieval and renaissance manuscripts in the country and the largest collection of Arabic manuscripts. The Gest Oriental Library contains the finest collection of Chinese rare books outside the Orient. English literature is strong, with the latter half of the nineteenth century particularly rich because of the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, the Janet Camp Troxell Rossetti Collection, the J. Harlin O'Connell Nineties Collection, the Miers Cruikshank Collection, and the Gallatin Beardsley Collection. Primary sources of history range from the splendid early Americana of Grenville Kane and Cyrus H. McCormick to the personal papers of public figures such as John Foster Dulles, James Forrestal, Adlai Stevenson, Bernard Baruch, and John Marshall Harlan.
The Friends of the Princeton Library, founded in 1930, and the Princeton University Library Chronicle, published by the Friends since 1939, have helped to establish communication with and among collectors and to make known to the scholarly world the resources of the Library.
It is impossible in a brief article to do justice to the collections as they exist today, but one should note that they are substantially richer in most fields represented in the teaching and research program of the University than the relative size of the Library would suggest. In perhaps a dozen fields Princeton's is one of the half-dozen best libraries in the country, and in another dozen fields it is very good indeed. This satisfying state is the product of generous donations of books and funds and the patient work of dozens of faculty and staff bibliographers and catalogers.
THE LIBRARIANS
For more than a hundred years those who served as Librarian, including, from 1812 to 1873, Philip Lindsly, John Maclean, Jr., George Musgrave Giger, and Henry Clay Cameron, almost always had other responsibilities as vice president, clerk of the faculty, or ``overseer of college repairs,'' as well as professor or tutor. However, their duties in the Library were light, since it was generally open only an hour or two a week for the circulation of books until President McCosh arrived in 1868 and extended the period to an hour on each of five days a week. The hours continued to be increased through the administration of Frederic Vinton, brought from the Library of Congress in 1873 by President McCosh as the first full-time librarian. When Ernest Cushing Richardson took office in 1890, he opened the building for study and the circulation of books from 8:00 in the morning until dusk. (The closing hour was extended to 10 p.m. in 1898, to midnight in 1928.)
The Library's various manuscript catalogs were simple lists without any subject arrangements until Cameron in the late 1860s rearranged the books on the shelves by subject, and his successor, Vinton, introduced an author and subject card cataloging system. The collection was completely recataloged by Richardson, using his own classification, which is still in use at Princeton in those areas that have not been changed to the Library of Congress classification.
As consultant and adviser Richardson was active in developing the concepts and systems that have made the Library of Congress the center of the nation's bibliographic control procedures, as he was in many other innovative aspects of librarianship. His successors have all been actively involved in national library affairs. James Thayer Gerould, librarian from 1920 to 1940, was one of the three founders of the Association of Research Libraries. Julian P. Boyd, whose Firestone Library was a remarkable achievement, was a leader in a generation of librarians who developed plans and procedures to strengthen the nation's collections by sharing resources. When Boyd resigned to devote full time to the editing of the monumental Papers of Thomas Jefferson, William S. Dix became librarian after a brief period in which Maurice Kelley of the Department of English was acting librarian. Dix, who served from 1953 to 1975, was chairman of the Association of Research Libraries and president of the American Library Association.
Richard W. Boss, appointed librarian in 1975, was succeeded in 1978 by Donald W. Koepp.
THE LIBRARY TODAY
The Princeton University Library has followed and supported the growth of Princeton from a college to a university, and has become the vital center of its intellectual life. The development of the preceptorial method, junior independent work, and the senior thesis have made the Library more and more important to the academic work of undergraduates. At no other university is there so high a ratio of books circulated per student, even though the open stacks and the generous provision of study areas make it possible for students to use more books without borrowing them than in most libraries in the world. At the same time the Library has gradually become a major research library as the number of faculty members and graduate students engaged in an ever-broader variety of studies has grown.
To fulfill this demanding role, it has been essential that the Library's staff, collections, physical facilities, and budget keep pace with the growth of the University's programs and the volume of worldwide publishing. By 1975, the staff, which had numbered eight in 1900, had grown to about 300. The collections totaled some 3.5 million printed books and microform equivalents; expenditures were more than $4.5 million. In 1973-1974 the Library added to its collections more than one and a half times as many volumes and microform equivalents as were in the total collection at the beginning of the century.
Yet the multiplication of recorded knowledge and the needs of users are so great that the Library seems little more adequate for today's University than the Library of 1900 was in its day. As Julian Boyd pointed out in 1940: ``The fallacy of an impossible completeness in any one library should be abandoned in theory and in practice; librarians should now think in terms of completeness for the library resources of the whole country.''
The exponential rates of growth of all university libraries cannot go on forever. The Princeton University Library continues to search for ways to increase its service to its community of students and scholars at the same time that in collaboration with its peers in this country and abroad it seeks ways of sharing resources more effectively.
William S. Dix