Charged to construct the "best college library in America", famed architect Frank Furness developed the design for this library with consultation from Melvil Dewey (inventor of the Dewey Decimal System) and Harvard librarian Justin Winsor. A step into the interior reveals a grand staircase, lofty reading rooms and more impressive architectural details.

The Duhring Wing was built at the south end of the stacks, making their designed expansion impossible.

Architect Robert Rodes McGoodwin drew up plans to cloak the entire building in sedate Collegiate Gothic brick and stone. The first step toward this was the 1931 addition of a reading room facing College Green (now the Arthur Ross Gallery) that masked the iron-and-glass stacks.Almost perversely, McGoodwin's incongruous Collegiate Gothic addition was dedicated as a memorial to Horace Howard Furness, however H.H Furness's Shakespeare home library home was housed in the addition before being moved to Van Pelt Library. A garden with plants found in Shakespeare's works was grown in front of the addition.

University of Pennslyvania recorder George E. Nitzsche included in his 1914 book “University of Pennsylvania: Its History, Traditions, Buildings and Memorials” a list of “mottoes on the windows and elsewhere in the library,” totaling more than 80, mostly in English, but some in Latin and Greek and one in cuneiform. Many quotes are from works of Shakespeare, from “Hamlet” to “Henry V” to “As You Like It” and beyond. After the library’s dedication in 1891, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported that H.H. Furness said the mottos were “not to teach the rustic moralist how to die, but to teach the learned student how to live.”

illustration in Proceedings at the Opening of the University of Pennsylvania Library (Philadelphia: February 7, 1891), opposite page 32.

Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library

The lamps at the foot of the staircase are reproductions of the originals, made with the bases of wine glasses.

In the 1960s and 70s, modernist architect Louis Kahn used the upper auditorium as a lecture room and design studio.&nbsp;