A Brief History of the Rare Books Collection

Roots in Old Main

Old Main, the first building on campus built in 1876, served as the Libraries' first home.  One room was dedicated to the growing collection.  Charles Buckingham, the Libraries first benefactor, was instrumental in the acquisition of building the collection.  By 1878, the Library owned 1,500 books and roughly 100 government publications.  Early purchases of rare books in 1889-90 included such classics as Francis Bacon's Works (London, 1730), purchased for $6.25, and Benjamin Franklin's Experiments and Observations on Electricity (London, 1774) for $2.50.  Both works are still housed in Special Collections.  

The Buckingham Library

In 1902, the campus broke ground for the new Buckingham Library (now the University of Colorado Theater).  The interior of the library, with its circulation desk, card catalog, bookstacks, and seating filled with young women and men hard at work, can be seen above.  By 1904, the library holdings had grown to 30,000 volumes, all housed in this two-story system of shelving directly accessible by the students.  

Norlin Library and the Rare Books Room

Norlin Library, named after university president George Norlin, opened its doors in 1940.  Designed by Charles Klauder in what the architect termed the "Italian rural" style, the structure we know so well was then the largest library between Chicago and the west coast (Mason, 109). 

In 1952, Professor Henry Pettit of the English Department oversaw the creation of the Rare Books Room, located in the south tower on the fifth floor of Norlin Library (Mason, 237).  Pettit, along with Professor Jacques Barchilon of the French Department, served as volunteer librarians, scouring Libraries stacks for the rarest works to be incorporated into the Rare Books Room.  Donations that year also helped to build what would later become known as Special Collections.  Sam Tour, an early twentieth-century graduate of the College of Engineering who went on to found his own metallurgy company, donated a number works key to the history of science and technology.  Donated by Tour, Sacro Bosco's De Sphaera (1574) and Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) remain two of our department's favorites.  Students were able to request such early works, paged by central desk attendants from the soon overflowing Rare Books Room vault, located on the 5th floor (Mason, 224; 228).  In the 1960s, Associate Director of the Libraries and by 1963, also head of Special Collections and the Western History Collection (later Archives), Henry Waltemade oversaw the inventory of rare manuscripts and books.  By 1964, he relocated the the Rare Books Room to what was then the Old Music Room, now the Center for British and Irish Studies.