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How to pronounce bibliothec in English?

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>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
>> Becky Brasington Clark: Good evening and welcome.
>> Good evening.
>> Becky Brasington Clark: Thank you for that.
Let's try that again.
Good evening and welcome.
>> Good evening.
>> Becky Brasington Clark: Thank you.
My name is Becky Brasington Clark and I have the privilege
of directing The Library of Congress publishing office.
We're delighted to see this crowd here, particularly
on such a beautiful day.
After such cold weather that you actually chose to come inside
and stay inside for a while is really a testament
to your conviction in this program.
Tonight in celebration of the 60th Anniversary
of National Library Week, we're delighted
to welcome Dr. Kenneth Breisch,
author of American Libraries 1730 to 1950.
Dr. Breisch's book is the latest in the acclaimed Norton Library
of Congress Visual Source Book in American Architecture,
Design, and Engineering series.
This series is a project of the Center for architecture,
design and engineering in The Library of Congress,
which was established through a bequest
from a distinguished American architect, Paul Rudolph,
to support the library's preservation of collection items
in these fields and to increase public knowledge
of and access to them.
Following Dr. Breisch's talk, The Emeritus founding director
of the center, Ford Petross (assumed spelling),
will say few words about the architecture
of The Jefferson Building and give you some insight
into what you're about to see on the post lecture tour.
I want to thank, offer a few thanks before introducing
Dr. Breisch.
First of all, Nancy Green [assumed spelling],
the series editor at W.W. Norton,
who worked on this series for many, many years
and was a real inspiration
and driving force behind the books in this series.
And she can't hear us, because she's not here tonight,
but she knows how much we appreciate her great work
on this series.
And also want to thank library colleagues who came together
to make this evening possible,
especially Helena Zincon [phonetic],
Mary Nakahara [phonetic], Barbara Natenson [phonetic],
Ford Petross, Jamal Forbes [assumed spelling],
Steve Hersch, Brett Cronell [phonetic],
Katherine Blood [assumed spelling],
Laura Chipchick [phonetic], Mary Mundy, Melissa Lindbergh,
Donna Collins, Cheryl Kennedy [assumed spelling],
Peggy Wagner, Susan Rayburn, Amy Hess,
Hannah Friese [assumed spelling],
Cheryl Lowe [assumed spelling],
and Sean Miller [assumed spelling].
And I'm sure I"ve missed a couple of people,
and for that I offer groveling apologizes.
Finally it's a pleasure
to introduce our speaker, Dr. Kenneth Breisch.
Dr. Breisch is an associate professor in the School
of Architecture at the University
of Southern California.
He's the former director and founder
of USC's graduate program in heritage conservation.
He has taught at CY ARK [phonetic], the University
of Delaware, and the University of Texas at Austin.
He is the author of Henry Hobson Richardson
and the Small Public Library in America
and the Los Angeles Central Library,
Building an Architectural Icon, 1872 through 1933.
We had the privilege of chatting with Dr. Breisch
for a few minutes while he was pre-signing the books,
which are available for purchase in the back.
And we learned that he has been kind of obsessed
with libraries for many, many years.
And among Library of Congress employees,
that's a great badge of distinction.
So without further adieu, Dr. Kenneth Breisch.
[ Applause ]
>> Kenneth Breisch: Thanks, Becky.
The truth be told, I just like hanging out with librarians.
Well, you've thanked many of the people I was going to thank,
but I should repeat at least briefly.
I want to thank you, Becky, and Ford Petross and Helena Zincon
in the department of prints and photographs,
Amy Hess in the publishing office,
who did an amazing job tracking
down with her eagle eye the details in terms of the URLs
for all of the illustrations which you'll see in the book.
Nancy Green at Norton, and then Daniel Greenberg
and Susan Steinhouser,
who actually helped subsidize the book
with their foundation in Los Angeles.
And so I'm very grateful to them.
And then Katy Horack [assumed spelling],
who was one of my graduate students,
was a graduate student many years ago
when the book was started, who helped me get going on the book.
This lecture is going to be very general and just a kind
of introduction, I think, to what's in the book.
But also the book itself is intended as an introduction
to illustrations in the departments
of prints and photographs.
Or the division, I should say, of prints and photographs
at The Library of Congress.
And so the images were chosen
from what they have in their collections.
Hence, which is a question I get often,
why the book ends in 1950.
They're now collecting more images of post 1950
or post World War II buildings,
but there just were not enough images
to really make an argument for the history
of post World War II library buildings.
Additionally, maybe I should be grateful
that they didn't have the images,
because as of now I think there are almost 17,000 public library
buildings alone in the United States.
That includes branch libraries, large libraries.
And that's not including, of course, college,
university libraries, et cetera.
So maybe, as I say, I should be thankful
that I had an excuse not to try to deal with that.
But they do have wonderful resources, and that's one
of the purposes of the book.
They have the Carol Highsmith collection.
She's the one who's filling in now the post war images.
And you'll see some of those at the end of my book,
beautiful color photographs.
The Detroit Publishing Company Archives,
the Farm Security Administration,
the Gottscho-Schleisner Collection.
Theodor Horydczak, I think collection,
if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
And, of course, the Historical American Building Survey
and many others that I used as a source
of reference for this book.
I can't see exactly, but that should be right, yes.
I'll trust that we're on the right slides here.
It's especially a privilege, I think, to be speaking
about libraries in The Thomas Jefferson Building.
Thomas Jefferson, as you know, believed fervently
in public education and education as the foundation
for American Democracy.
And one of the primary focuses
of his philosophical program was the founding of the University
of Virginia as a public educational institution.
And the centerpiece of that campus,
of that enlightenment inspired campus, was the rotunda
or the library replacing what actually in Europe
and the United States,
that's the early colleges, had been the chapel.
So it reflects his, as I say,
enlightenment interests in education.
Libraries of course extend far, much further into the past than,
of course, Jefferson, back to the legendary of course Library
of Alexandria 300 BC in the Tolamase [phonetic] and then
up through the Middle Ages
in the next Kodex Amiotus [phonetic],
which shows Ezra writing the law.
This was published in the late 16th Century,
as I think you can see.
I find it really fascinating
in that the fundamental requirements
of the library have really changed very little over time.
This could almost be a computer carol,
except that there are books there.
But you have to have ample storage for your collections,
depending upon the size, a quiet comfortable well lit hopefully
place to read or now to access your computer,
although I still read.
And then as libraries became larger, of course stations
or desks for the distribution of books or the charging of books
for the distribution of information to library patrons.
And then as we know at The Library of Congress a variety,
a great variety of spaces
for administrative activities sorting books, repairing books,
and just bureaucratic work in many different ways.
So libraries can really come in any kind
of size, shape, or form.
We have Roy's wonderful library.
Ansel Adams was commissioned
to document the internment camp during World War II at Manzanar,
where there were 100,000 Japanese, or 10,000 at Manzanar,
but interned during the war.
Roy Tucano [phonetic] actually was the editor
of the camp newspaper, and this is his library
which you can imagine was very, very precious to him.
And I find it fascinating too, that while Ansel Adams,
a great American photographer, was recording the architecture
in the camp that he zeroed in on this small but, as I say,
very precious kind of collection of books.
This, of course, is a private collection and it's one
of a variety of different types of libraries that are talked
about the in the book.
The Loganian Library, which you can see here, I think,
is in a way a descendant or related
to Benjamin Franklin's Library Company of Philadelphia,
which he founded in 1731.
But James Logan's library was a private collection,
probably the largest or nearly the largest in the country
at the time numbering some 2,600 volumes.
And he built this small building to house it.
It's the first actually, I think,
purpose built public library
or library building in the United States.
He made his money in the fur trade.
He was a close associate of the Penn family,
one of the wealthiest people in the country.
But he allowed scholars and others into the library
to use the collection.
It's one, of course, of dozens
of private libraries here in Washington.
The Folger-Shakespeare Library, for example.
But the Morgan Library, The Huntington Library
in Los Angeles, all of which are private libraries
that housed collections that were accumulated by individuals
who loved books and then for the most part opened them
up to scholars and the public.
But these libraries, to me, remind me often of a quote
in Alberto Manuel's book, The Library at Night,
which if you don't know it, you should, in which he writes
in the introduction, "No one's stepping," and this could apply
to many, many libraries,
but especially these research libraries, I think.
"No one's stepping for the first time into a room made
of books can know instinctively how to behave.
What is expected?
What is promised?
What is allowed?
One may be overcome by horror at the clutter or the vastness,
the stillness, the mocking reminder
of everything one doesn't know, the surveillance.
And some of that overwhelming feeling may cling on even
after the rituals and conventions are learned,
the geography mapped, the natives found friendly."
I feel that way about my research often,
and the natives are always found friendly eventually.
But it can be intimidating certainly
to enter a foreign territory and foreign libraries.
The book also has a chapter on The Library of Congress.
We'll be fortunate today to see parts of it
that I haven't seen actually and that many people haven't seen.
But as you probably know,
I think you're all nadens [phonetic] of the Library
of Congress, but it was founded in 1800 by legislation,
by Congress, and then burned in the War of 1812,
in 1814 actually, and owes it resurgence in large part,
at that time, to Thomas Jefferson again, who in 1815,
in debt as he often was, sold his library of some five
or six thousand books.
Some of them have survived to The Library of Congress.
There was grumbling on the part of the Congressmen
as to why they would be spending money, especially on books
that they couldn't read because many were in Latin or Greek
or other, French even, foreign languages.
Things don't change much, I guess, in some ways.
But that forms the core of a real research library
for Congress, the government, but also other individuals.
Eventually in 1851, a new structure was built
in the library to house the books.
This is by Thomas Eustic Walter.
It was a fireproof iron construction,
because there had been a second fire just previous to this
in which many of Jefferson's books actually were
unfortunately destroyed as well as other books.
This served as The Library of Congress really
up until it was replaced by this building, which began actually
to be contemplated in the early 1870s,
the proliferation of books.
And the Copyright Act, which required books to be placed
in The Library of Congress,
meant that this small library was very quickly outgrown
so that in 1873 Congress authorized a competition
for the new Library of Congress.
Here you can see an entry by Alexander Este actually
in the collection and prints and photographs.
There are dozens and dozens of these drawings.
This will have to do for an exterior.
It's the late 19th Century.
You can imagine every eclectic style was submitted by good
and not so good architects.
The idea though, was to model it
on the British Museum Reading Room.
And most of the entries had a rotunda or circular reading room
at the center of the collection.
This is by John Frazier.
These are just examples.
The next is a detail.
I think we're lucky we got what we got, and not this perhaps,
but this was his proposal for the reading room
which ultimately as designed by Smith, Myer and Pelts beginning
with their final designs.
They actually entered the early competition in 1888,
resulted in the reading room that we have today
that you're all familiar with.
But it really only forms a central focus of the library.
Something we'll see today are the stacks that open up around
that library, stacks there were designed to hold millions
of books, one of the largest libraries at the time.
And also a very modern library
with equipment designed by Bernard Green.
Conveyor belts, pneumatic tubes to convey orders from patrons
to librarians in the shelves or in the stacks,
and then they would be loaded onto conveyors
and delivered back to the delivery room.
So I find that interesting as well, when we talk
about modern technology in the library,
that it's really not all that new to some extent,
although they didn't have computers certainly at the time.
There are other types of libraries
that form their own chapters in the books.
Society Libraries.
These were private libraries that were actually founded
by individuals who pooled their money, often paid an annual
or monthly fee to be members of the library.
This is The Redwood Library in Newport, Rhode Island,
the earliest surviving building related
to a Society Library sometimes called Athenaea [phonetic].
Sometimes they were in basements of churches.
Other times they did have buildings.
But these were put together, as I say, by individuals.
Not just men, but women as well.
Women, as we move into the 19th Century,
became the great readers and reading clubs
and library clubs actually formed the foundation
or the basis for many
of the public libraries in the United States.
They were dissolved in the collections given to the city
or the public library when that became available.
And public libraries form a major focus of the book.
As I say, we're just skimming the surface here.
Here from a book recording the reception of George Peabody
at The Peabody Institute in 1856.
George Peabody was an American financier in London,
actually a patron of Morgan as well, who in 1852 gave $20,000
to his native village of South Danvers in 1868,
renamed Peabody, Massachusetts in his honor.
He arrived in 1856.
And all of the children led him through the town
with processions and speeches, and a great celebration.
This happened dozens and dozens of times all
across the United States in the 19th Century.
The public libraries were very often endowed
by wealthy individuals who gave money back to their communities
with mixed motives, I suppose, but it did establish
by 1900 some 500 library buildings,
public library buildings in the United States.
These grew in size.
Here the Peabody Institute in Baltimore,
one of the great hall libraries and one of the only ones
that survive actually.
Great cast-iron structure again to be fireproof built in 1855.
There were others such as The Boston Public Library,
the first one before the one we know today,
which you can see here, which was also a hall library.
These are primarily reference libraries, academic libraries.
The books were fenced off.
The librarians would get them for you, but you could read them
if you had the proper introduction often
in the center of the room.
The Boston Public Library has a whole other history,
however in the basement was a public lending library
where it was decided that they would lend books free of charge
to any citizen of Boston.
There was a lot of debate about that,
whether they'd ever see the books again,
whether they'd come back filthy or with diseases.
There was even debate about closing off the lending library
at one point because the workers were all coming in unshowered
and quite odiferous, I guess, smelly at the time.
Justin Windsor, the long-time librarian,
the founding librarian
at The Boston Public Library argued strongly against that.
He said put in a new ventilation system, which they did,
and so it remained a great public library.
The second library in Boston, which you can see here,
of course marks the end of the 19th Century or the beginning
of what's often referred to as The American Renaissance,
a new or neo-classical revival that swept across the country.
Did you show the reading room already?
Yeah, okay, that's fine.
You saw the reading room.
It actually was modeled
on the Bibliothec Juan [foreign language] in Paris,
but you can see that even here
in the United States it became even more sort of neo-classical
than this French library of the mid 19th Century.
There were smaller public libraries as well.
Henry Hobson Richardson, out of Boston,
really created an important prototype in part based
on the Bibliothec Juan [foreign language].
I don't have a pointer, and even if I did you can leave
that there for the moment.
You can see that the book wing actually derives
and is an Americanized kind of version
of the Bibliothec [foreign language].
Book wings for storage areas, up until this time they were
at the back of the building as just rooms for storing books.
Richardson rotated it around so you could identify this
as a library as well a public library
with a grand kind of entryway.
Richardson was working in the later 19th Century.
By the end of the century, smaller libraries also.
Just an example of his impact, and then the next one, I guess.
By the late 19th Century and early 20th Century,
small libraries too were taking on a neo-
classical kind of format.
This is a beautiful little building in a very small town
in Massachusetts; in Conway, Massachusetts
up in the northern part of the state.
It's a great surprise to find it at the end of the Main Street.
It was built by Marshall Field, who was born in Conway and,
of course, moved to Chicago
and founded the great department store empire.
And he gave this back to the community.
It's by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge,
who were the successor firm to Richardson.
But you can see how the style shifted at this point.
And the plan itself begins to take the form,
although it will become more and more open in the 20th Century
of typical small public libraries in the first decade
or two of the 19th Century with the reading rooms to either side
of a central charging desk or librarian's desk.
There were larger libraries as well
that reflect this new neo-classism,
but also the growing importance of public libraries.
The Boston Public Libraries have kicked things off,
but then of course we have the great New York Public Library
by Carrere and Hastings designed
by its librarian, John Shaw Billings.
Reading room covers actually a quarter acre of space,
and was set atop in the next slide.
You can see from the back, set atop the stacks which had all
of the same kinds of conveyor belts and tubes
and other things, but now the books could just rise
up to the central delivery area in the library.
But again I find it interesting this faces, of course,
the park, Bryant Park.
But you can identify this immediately as a library,
because you can recognize, if you know what you're looking at,
the stacks that are an integral part of the library.
In New York, it was joined in the early 20th Century
by over 60 branch libraries actually in around 1901.
Andrew Carnegie gave the city 5.2 million dollars
to build 67 neighborhood libraries,
which really became the focus of his attention.
He wanted to educate the working classes and Americanize them.
He had probably mixed motives as well.
But the branch libraries were a big part of his program,
but not of course the only part.
Everybody knows Carnegie Libraries.
Oh, there's Mr. Carnegie.
And then the next, oh, which marks the beginning really
of his library building program.
He began in 1886 to build buildings
in his steel mill towns.
Again as a giving back to the community,
but also placating the workers' homestead.
Some of you know perhaps now because of the library,
but because of the strike, a very violent strike.
This was built shortly afterwards and it was intended
as a community center that was an auditorium,
a swimming pool, a library.
And then the next, Marion the Librarian would probably be
appalled, but a pool hall as well,
which did not become a regular part of his program.
As he began to offer money for the construction
of public libraries to any community in the United States
which would agree to fund the library, the maintenance
of the library and perpetuity at 10 percent
of the cost of the building.
So if he gave $10,000 for a building,
there had to be legislation to make sure
that there was $1,000 a year to buy books and to pay salaries,
and maintain the building.
Carnegie was a great believer in self help.
He wasn't going to give you everything.
He wrote an essay, a famous essay in 1889 called Wealth,
in which he argued that you could help but people had
to help themselves ultimately.
And they did, and they helped themselves to his libraries,
I guess, Nebraska up there.
They spread all across.
>> Iowa?
>> Kenneth Breisch: I'm sorry, yeah, Iowa.
That's one that should be there.
Spread all across the country due to his largest.
Between 1889 and 1900, he endowed 37 new library buildings
in the United States including the old Washington Public
Library, which many of you know, which I think is going
to resurrected finally, I hear.
And then by 1917, the outbreak of the war,
when his program ended, he had built 1,679 libraries
in the Unites States spreading in large part this kind of neo-
classical style to these small communities
where these buildings really stood
out as monumental structures within the community as symbols
of culture and learning as well.
So in some ways perhaps, you know, Carnegie led.
His endowment led to things.
He didn't really expect necessarily,
but it spread the public library movement all
across the United States.
And through his personal secretary,
modern library design.
James Bertram, in 1911, who actually answered all
of the correspondence from everybody
who asked for a library.
As I say, almost 1,700 were built.
There are dozens of reels of microfilm at Columbia
of his correspondence that survived.
It's actually quite amusing sometimes.
He and Carnegie were great believers along
with the librarian, Melville Dewey, in spelling reform,
which you can perhaps see on this slide.
But he published this short pamphlet, in which he said
that these diagrams were intended to be suggestive rather
than mandatory for communities that wanted to build libraries.
Nowhere do they say they should be classical,
but that was the style at the time for a number of reasons
that we don't have time to go into.
But ultimately his goal was, as he says,
to obtain for the money the utmost amount of effective,
and that's not a misspelling, accommodation consistent
with good taste in building.
And his correspondence follows that, that scheme.
But it introduced this idea of the open plan
for the public library.
So that the librarian from the central charging desk could keep
an eye on everybody in the library as well as the books
at the rear of the building, depending on the size.
Carnegie also endowed many academic libraries including the
Tuskogee Institute Library, which you see here designed
by the professor of architecture there, Robinson Robert Taylor.
Here a view of Carnegie with Booker T. Washington
and others celebrating that particular library.
So academic libraries are another story.
We saw the exterior of the rotunda.
One of the ideas of the book is to look
at the different configurations and planning of libraries,
which you could get some sense of tonight perhaps.
Here is a circular library,
which Jefferson designed as a rotunda.
Or the first library at Harvard, what was the largest library
in the country at the time, Gorhall at Harvard,
which was designed to hold 100,000 books.
The Boston Atheneum, another private library,
was almost equivalent.
Josiah Quincy, the president at the time,
for some reason celebrated this and asked that it be designed
in the gothic style saying that it was designed somewhat
in the form of the chapels of many Catholic churches.
And I've never been able to figure
out why Protestant Harvard would be interested
in Catholic churches, but you can see here an example
of a hall library and the exterior.
It looks like a gothic church.
Academic libraries, of course,
led the way in terms of expansion.
One of the largest earlier libraries was The Sterling
Memorial Library at Yale.
James Gambell Rogers,
who designed many other buildings there,
here you can see how he displays the size
of the 5 million volume collection this was intended
to hold in 16 tiers of metal stacks,
which again are indicated on the exterior by this great kind
of tower, I guess, to compete
with Harvard probably in terms of size.
The section on libraries ends with Frank Lloyd Wright,
who did design not just the Guggenheim, but the Roux Library
at Florida Southern College in Lakeland,
which you can see here just before the war.
The reading room is fascinating.
The reading room is the next there,
which again is centralized.
Actually perhaps even, although Wright would deny it, I'm sure,
a kind of reflection of Jefferson's library at Virginia,
although much more organic and lyrical
than the classicism of Jefferson.
Great drama, sweeping curbs in the interior.
So that really kind of covers the focus of the book.
There's an afterward.
I felt it necessary to include some
of the late great masterpieces,
almost all photographed again by Carol.
There's, of course, the great Beinecke Library
to hold the Beinecke Collection of Rare Books at Yale.
Louis Kahn's Phillips Exeter Academy again look back
to the hall library tradition, but with a great kind
of explication of the structure of the building,
really incredible interior.
And then finally we can end with one
of the recent again masterpieces,
but a new experiment in terms of library design.
The Seattle Public Library, by Rem Koolhaas, which is designed
by a series of ramps which sort of spiral
up in a rectangular way from what he calls the living room
through a series of bookshelves and computer spaces designed
to hold 1.4 million volumes.
It opens up looking out over the City of Seattle,
especially from the tenth floor
where the reading room is located.
Again really in the tradition of The Boston Public Library
in some ways, but of course in a very modern
and progressive kind of style.
So that's sort of it, for a kind of overview.
If you have questions, I don't know if we have time
for questions because we have tours lined up.
Did I get through it?
[ Background Conversations ]
>> The whole library actually.
It's not so much the whole library.
It's sort of later, modern planning.
But, yeah, that would be part of it.
The librarian could keep an eye on everything.
But it was a style that actually developed
in the early Renaissance period.
The Ambrosian Library in Milan was one
of the first hall libraries.
I think it was just a way of stacking the books
around the reading room, as much as anything, and enclosing it.
And collections were beginning to grow.
So they needed more space,
especially for The Ambrosian Library, which was one
of the largest at the time.
But it became one of the early typologies
for American Public Libraries, which you can see
in the book after, you know, 1860 or so.
Any other?
Yes, ma'am.
[ Background Conversations ]
In terms of form, yes, to some extent.
But we were the great library builders, really, I think.
The idea, and maybe this doesn't quite answer your question.
But the idea of the public lending library was invented
in the United States, and it's one
of the great inventions along maybe with National Parks
that we gave to the world, I suppose.
European Libraries are much more restrictive.
And, of course, in more autocratic countries, you know,
the rulers didn't want people reading books, you know.
So there wasn't a proliferation of libraries.
There were academic libraries,
like the Bibliothec [foreign language] for students.
They're even suspicious of that,
because the students would take to the streets.
But for the most part, collections were private
and so not on the same scale.
You know, there are some exceptions,
but I think we really developed this whole idea of the library
as really the centerpiece not just of, you know, learning
and democracy, but of culture and community
which is something I didn't talk a lot about.
But it's kind of interesting
that public libraries are returning
to the idea of the Athenaea.
They never really gave it up.
But these are places for showing films, for story hour
for younger patrons, but for lectures
and other community kinds of events as well
as now computer access.
Any other?
>> How many of the libraries have you seen personally?
>> Kenneth Breisch: Who?
Me? I don't know.
I lost count, lost track long ago.
I've been doing this for way too long.
It's just they all blend together after a while,
maybe like mush in my head.
I don't know.
A lot. But as I say, there are now, you know, almost 17,000
of these little guys around.
So I've a long way to go, although I may turn
to other things one of these days.
Is there another?
[Inaudible comment] People are anxious
to see the gallery, I think, as am I.
Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of The Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.

>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

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bibliothec::noun | Spocien Dictionary

bibliothec

noun

a professional person trained in library science and engaged in library services

Type	Words
Synonyms	librarian
Type of	professional, professional person
Has types	cataloguer, cataloger

How to pronounce bibliothec in English?

bibliothec::noun | Spocien Dictionary

abandonment

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