George Peabody Library

The George Peabody Library was stocked from a list before it had a room. George Peabody, a merchant who grew rich in Baltimore, gave $300,000 in February 1857 to found an institute for the city. It was to include a public reference library “for the free use of all persons who desire to consult it”. The Civil War pushed the opening back from 1860 to 1866. The first librarian, John Morris, and the library committee chairman, John Pendleton Kennedy, used the wait to study the catalogues of the leading libraries in the United States and Europe. Morris drew up a list of 50,000 titles and pursued them whatever the difficulty or cost.

His successors kept the method and extended it to science by asking specialists what to buy. Building a collection from a considered list, rather than from whatever came to hand, later became standard practice in academic libraries. It is a telling use of the library catalogue: other libraries’ records served as a map of what a serious collection should contain.

The room followed. Edmund George Lind designed it with the institute’s provost, Nathaniel H. Morison, and it opened in 1878. An atrium rises 61 feet to a latticed skylight of frosted glass, ringed by five tiers of black cast-iron balconies made by the Bartlett-Hayward Company. Morison called it a cathedral of books.

The collection now runs to some 300,000 volumes and centres on the 19th century. The library passed to the City of Baltimore in 1967 and to Johns Hopkins University in 1982, and it is still open to the public. The hall is also hired out for events, and the fees support the library.