WALTER BEINECKE, JR.

114 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK II, N.Y.

June 5, 1959

Mr. James T. Babb
Librarian
Yale University Library
Box 1603A Yale Station
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Jim:

This will confirm our conversation today regarding
the contemplated new Rare Books building for Yale.

The Beineckes are considering the possibility of
donating such a building to Yale but believe that
before making any commitment on this, a great deal
more information is necessary both from your point
of view and ours.

Accordingly, we have the following to suggest:
That an architect should be selected agreeable to
yourselves and us and that he should be commissioned
to prepare preliminary plans; we believe that the
right approach to this would be to select about
four firms and to ask them to submit a rendering
of a proposed building as a competition for the
award of contract. This is a proper thing to
request of an architectural firm without incurring
any obligation or commitment. From the rendering
submitted we should select one and then negotiate
with that architect for further studies which
would lead us to a conclusion as to what the pro-
ject would be and how much it would cost. At
that time we would be prepared to make a gift to
the University to cover the cost of a reasonable
architectural study. Initially I would submit
to you the names of the following firms:

Alfred Easton Poor
400 Park Avenue
New York City
Mr. Al Swanke

EDWIN J. BEINECKE

114 FIFTH AVENUE
NEW YORK

August 21, 1959

AUG 2 5 1959

Mr. James T. Babb, Librarian
Yale University Library
New Haven, Connecticut

Dear Jim:

I have received at my home in Greenwich your letter of the
18th and am dictating a reply to it from there to my secretary
in New York, asking her to mail it to you today so that you
will surely have it when Fritz and I see you Tuesday.

Your letter is a well reasoned plea for an addition to the
Sterling Library which we all know needs more space. However,
it doesn't fit in with Fritz' and my idea for a Rare Book
Library building, the general details of which I wrote President
Griswold on August 14th, of which you have received a copy.

The George A. Fuller Company of which I was Chairman for a number
of years has built more Rare Book Libraries than any other builder
in the United States so you have the construction end of the new
library competently covered. You have selected Mr. Gordon Bunshaft
as your architect. I believe he is the most capable creative
designer that we have in the United States today, so that angle
is fully covered.

The old search for the philosophers stone wherewith to transmute
base metal into gold is in our present case today superseded by
the search for money wherewith to transmute the ethereal dream
of a Rare Book Library into the concrete reality of an appropriate
building with necessary appurtenances.

Your conception of a Rare Book Library as set forth in your
letter of the 18th, and ours, differ radically. Your idea seems
to be for an extension of the Sterling Library which the Rare
Book Library will infiltrate and eventually in twenty years or so,
absorb.

I am afraid the heavy tail you are attempting to fasten to our
Rare Book kite will make it impossible for it ever to leave
the ground and fly.

We have never had the ambition to build a Sterling Library annex.

To: Messrs. Babb and Ottemiller

From: M.G. Wynne

New Building Memo No. 2

7 December 1959

After we first saw the drawings for the new building and you asked us to study and comment on them, Mr. Liebert wrote and showed me a full and general statement about basic purpose and design - a statement with which I agreed in every detail. I felt that if you accepted these basic premises, you would suggest to the architect that he study the situation a little longer and submit another and entirely different set of plans. I felt so certain of this that I refrained from writing down suggestions for shifting offices, catalogues, tables, stairways, etc. until the general outline of the building had been settled to everyone's satisfaction.

Now, it may not be possible to design a building that everybody who sees will like, but I think it is possible to design one that all the people who work in will like. I think it's very significant that not one person whose days will be spent in the new building really likes or approves of the present design. With certain re-arrangements discussed on December 4th, it will be possible to exist in it, but I would personally hope for more than that, and I'm sure you do too. I want a library that we can be proud of, not one that we will have to rationalize and explain away as an architect's whim. If the building were reasonable in all its inner workings and just whimsical on the outside, I could accept and ignore the inevitable chiding of librarians and scholars, but I honestly believe that the fundamental and traditional relationship between books and readers should not be reversed.

Research libraries are for storing great quantities of books in safe and relatively unobtrusive areas, and for making them quickly available in conspicuous and comfortable areas. We all agree that these are special books and deserve a special setting, but their best interests will be served by miles and miles of compact, well lighted, air-controlled shelves, where the first consideration is safety and convenience, not lofty store-window effects. Some of the particularly handsome books could be shelved in an entrance rotunda, but the majority should remain unseen. The elegant touches should be reserved for the reading room and for all the added features that scholars have needed and seldom found in libraries over the years. My chief objections to the rising tower of books are:

1. Books in mass are neither handsome nor thrilling. No matter how you arrange the shelving, you will see more shelving than books (each shelf will be only half filled, to begin with) and the books will be too far away to exert their potential charm. If the visitor cannot walk right up to the shelves and read authors and titles and dates, he will not be personally moved or stimulated. Incunabula in a rotunda, where he can get within a few inches of the books themselves, will be much more effective than just a dark block surrounded by a moat and rising, completely out of his reach, up to the top of the building. The scholar will only be interested in a good catalogue and fast service, not in balancing on his heels and looking at an unapproachable mass. The book tower then will be just for the idle and curious tourist, and I cannot bear to think that that is what our new building is going to be designed for.

2] The tower arrangement will probably double the time required for getting and shelving books in that particular section, since it's obvious that to go from level to level, either by stair or by elevator, takes longer than walking around on one floor.

3] The wasted space of moat and gallery is hard to justify. Even with a few potted palms and cushioned benches it's going to be a cold and uninviting place, especially to the Library Associates; the books will be too far away to attract attention and there will be nothing else in that area to attract them except semi-permanent exhibitions which are not designed for them anyway. I fear that the Library Associates will spend little or no time in all that empty space - they want people, or if not, they want books in their hands. But mostly they want to talk about books with other people, and they will spend their time in the curators' offices which is quite right and natural. If Mr. Beinecke feels that they should have a stronghold of their own (and I'm not at all opposed to that) then with a new plan, some of the now empty space could be made into a comfortable room with some warmth and charm. Your portrait and Mr. Tinker's could hang there, and the Beineckes' too.

If the free-standing stack tower were eliminated, the focal point of the building would inevitably shift to the reading room, and so far as I can tell this would please everybody in any way now connected with the new building. I like many of the arrangements we discussed on December 4th, but I still feel obliged to continue writing and speaking in favor of a service entrance for these reasons:

1] On general principles it isn't logical for a building that large not to have one. Ignoring the constant traffic in books, there will be other objects that will come in from time to time - furniture, machines to be mended and returned, etc. - and it will not be convenient to trundle them through tunnels.

2] Remember too that we do not just receive books and manuscripts, we send them out - and I have spent many an hour going back and forth to the shipping room until I could find the attendant with a free moment, then standing by to supervise the packing, and then wheeling the wrapped shipment back to the RBR to rest overnight, until the money wagon arrived the next morning. We usually deal in heavily insured material, and a special truck comes to collect it only once a day - and sometimes not then. When such material leaves the new building, how can we know where it will rest completely unattended for the next 24 or 48 hours? Please believe me when I say that I've had some bitter experiences with the shipping room, including the moment I discovered that Walter Beinecke's Barrie collection had been sitting out on the platform for 5 days and nights. They are not equipped to store rare material in a safe place until it can be sent out, or brought to the new building, and we must recognize the fact that they are not going to drop everything and rush shipments to us the moment they arrive. I'm speaking now of things that are directed specifically to the new building, like the three large cartons just returned from the Morgan Library, containing our Johnson material lent to their exhibition.

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

DEC 3 1959

Memorandum to: Mr. Babb
From: D.G.Wing

Dated: December 3, 1959

I feel genuinely sorry for your present dilemma. I haven't heard a good word for the drawings of the proposed building and I can't feel able to invent any myself.

I accuse myself of sour grapes but I can't feel any enthusiasm over the architect's drawings. To me it all adds up to a terrific white elephant - both for the Library and for the Administration. Leaving aside the rearrangement of the "work space" I will confine myself to the larger remainder. I think the book-stack above ground is awful. Far from seeing books, at the shorter ends no books will be visible. Service will take infinitely longer than now and even with re-located elevators most books will be much further from the "desk" than now. I don't see any excuse for the proposed exhibition cases. They will be entirely for visitors who want to see more than title-pages. What good will the four-sided walk-around be to Associates? This all strikes me as an architect's dream and our future nightmare. Why are the onyx walls so much longer than what they cover? And what is the roof? Woodbridge Hall will have cigarette butts and orange peel waiting to be picked up every day in the sunken - (what?). No account seems to be paid to our notorious winter weather. Is this for Coral Gables?

What happens to our most famous book - the Gutenberg Bible? We don't want all New Haven High School students in the new building so we have a Rare Book Library minus the key piece? I count on the other members of the committee to rearrange the reader-librarian relationships - there is space enough on the wrong levels but I can't think any one of us wants the onyx silo for our own good or the costly preservation of the books.