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| Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library | |
|---|---|
 "You could destroy all the other Harvard buildings and, with Widener left standing, still have a university." — G. L. Kittredge[1] | |
 | |
| 42°22′24.4″N 71°06′59.4″W / 42.373444°N 71.116500°W | |
| Location | Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Type | Academic |
| Established | 1915 |
| Branch of | Harvard Library |
| Collection | |
| Items collected | Primarily humanities and social sciences |
| Size |
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| Access and use | |
| Access requirements | Harvard faculty, students & staff |
| Circulation | 600,000 items/year |
| Other information | |
| Website | Widener Library |
The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library, housing some 3.5 million books,[2] is the centerpiece of the Harvard Library system. It honors 1907 Harvard College graduate and book collector Harry Elkins Widener, and was built by his mother Eleanor Elkins Widener soon after his death in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.
Widener's "vast and cavernous" [3] stacks hold works in more than one hundred languages which together comprise "one of the world's most comprehensive research collections in the humanities and social sciences." [4] Its 57 miles (92 km) of shelves, along five miles (8 km) 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." [5]
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,[6] "the precious group of rare and wonderfully interesting books brought together by Mr. Widener",[7] to which was later added one of the few perfect Gutenberg Bibles—the object of a 1969 burglary attempt conjectured by Harvard's police chief to have been inspired by the 1964 heist film Topkapi.
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