page_title: Widener Library
section_title: Death of Harry Widener
hierarchical_section_title: Widener Library / Background, conception and gift / Death of Harry Widener
caption_attribution_description: Removing books from Gore Hall prior to its demolition. Harvard University Archives Photograph Collection: Views, circa 1850-2004. HUV 48 (17-1)
context_page_description: The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, housing some 3.5 million books in its "vast and cavernous" stacks, is the center­piece of the Harvard College Libraries and, more broadly, of the entire Harvard Library system.
  It honors 1907 Harvard College graduate and book collector Harry Elkins Widener, and was constructed by his mother Eleanor Elkins Widener after his death in the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912.
  The library's holdings, which include works in more than one hundred languages, comprise "one of the world's most comprehen­sive research collec­tions in the humanities and social sciences."
  Its 57 miles of shelves, along five miles of aisles on ten levels, comprise a "labyrinth" which one student "could not enter without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle."
  At the building's heart are the Widener Memorial Rooms, displaying papers and mementos recalling the life and death of Harry Widener, as well as the
  Harry Elkins Widener Collec­tion,
  "the precious group of rare and wonder­fully interesting books brought together by Mr. Widener",
context_section_description: In 1912, Harry Elkins Widener‍—‌scion of two of the wealthiest families in America, a 1907 graduate of Harvard College, and an accomplished bibliophile despite his youth‍—‌died
  in the sinking of the RMS Titanic.
  His father George Dunton Widener also perished, but his mother Eleanor Elkins Widener survived.
  Harry Widener's will instructed that his mother, when "in her judgment Harvard University shall make arrange­ments for properly caring for my collec­tion of books ... shall give them to said University to be known as the Harry Elkins Widener Collection",
  and he had told a friend, not long before he died, "I want to be remembered in connection with a great library, [but] I do not see how it is going to be brought about." 
  To enable the fulfillment of her son's wishes Eleanor Widener briefly consid­ered funding an addition to Gore Hall, but soon determined to build instead a completely new and far larger library building‍—‌"a perpetual memorial" 
  to Harry Widener, housing not only his personal book collection but Harvard's general library as well,
  with room for growth.
  As Biel has written, "The [Harvard architects] committee's Beaux Arts design [for Gore Hall's projected replacement], with its massiveness and symmetry, offered monumen­tal­ity with nothing more particular to monumen­tal­ize than the aspira­tions of the modern university"‍—‌until the Titanic sank and "through delicate negotia­tion, [Harvard] convinced Eleanor Widener that the most eloquent tribute to Harry would be an entire library rather than a rare book wing." 
caption: Two electric trucks removed Gore Hall's books for storage during Widener's construction.[22]
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