ABSTRACT
The public library is a quintessentially American institution, first developed and widely popularized in the US, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. Its earliest architectural influences, however, are European in origin, representing divergent traditions in library building that extend as far back historically as the classical and medieval eras. In the Middle Ages, new influences in library planning and design arose as books and book production moved to monasteries and abbeys—remote outposts of civilization where libraries were transformed as places of quiet reflection and religious study, closely associated with the Catholic Church and newly formed monastic orders. The second century Library of Celsus, at Ephesus in Asia Minor, is a rare surviving example of library building from the Roman era, incorporating basic features of the classical type. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, libraries of the Renaissance emerged as centers for humanistic studies—places of scholarly reading and discourse that incorporated classical as well as ecclesiastical writings.
