Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library

How to Get There

From downtown New Haven hotels (0.5 mi): Walk north toward the Yale University campus and follow signage to Hewitt Quadrangle, where the library sits across from Woolsey Hall.

Overview

The Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library is Yale's rare book library, completed in 1963 on Hewitt Quadrangle to a design by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. A windowless façade of marble and granite panels wraps a six-story glass tower of book stacks, and it is one of the largest buildings in the world devoted to rare books and manuscripts. The public can visit the exhibition mezzanine and the sunken courtyard by Isamu Noguchi. Researchers need to register to use the collections.

Highlights

• Gutenberg Bible: one of 48 known copies, on display on the mezzanine
• Exhibitions: rotating displays year-round on the mezzanine and ground floor
• Capacity: 180,000 volumes in the tower and over a million in underground stacks

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0