Breisch, Kenneth. American Libraries 1730 – 1950. New York : W.W. Norton & Company ; Washington, D.C. : Library of Congress, 2017. ISBN 9780393731606.
An expansive overview of our
storehouses of knowledge, from the earliest library building (Philadelphia,
1745) to midcentury modern and beyond. Although new technologies appear
poised to alter it, the library remains a powerful site for discovery, and its
form is still determined by the geometry of the book and the architectural
spaces devised to store and display it. American Libraries provides
a history and panorama of these much-loved structures, inside and out,
encompassing the small personal collection, the vast university library, and
everything in between.
Through 500 photographs and plans selected from the
encyclopedic collections of the Library of Congress, Kenneth Breisch traces the
development of libraries in the United States, from roots in such iconic
examples as the British Library and Paris’s Bibliotheque-Ste.-Genevieve to
institutions imbued with their own American mythology. Starting with the
private collections of wealthy merchants and landowners during the eighteenth
century, the book looks at the Library of Congress, large and small public
libraries, and the Carnegie libraries, and it ends with a glimpse of modern
masterworks. [Includes] 850 illustrations.
