One of the Greatest Creations of 19th Century American Culture

Welcome to the Fisher Fine Arts Library.

From the piece in The Wall Street Journal...

Because books were such a familiar and natural component of Furness's upbringing, he did not sentimentalize them. When his contemporaries set about designing libraries, they tended to treat them reverently, as if they were a shrine for sacred objects. But Furness knew that books were active, useful, even incendiary things—the antebellum abolitionist tracts that his father wrote had brought repeated death threats.

Frank Furness's building, then, was perhaps the only library to treat the act of reading as an active and dynamic enterprise. The building is an engine of active thought, divided into four separate volumes, each serving a different function and assuming a different shape. Most dominant is the stairhall, rising to 95 feet and isolated from the library proper so that the sound of footsteps would not penetrate the main reading room (a problem that classical libraries, with their central stair, never quite resolve).

Photo by Margie Politzer.