Boston Public Library (Three pictures)
I am indebted to Kenneth A. Breisch whose Henry Hobson Richardson and the Small Public Library in America (MIT Press, 1997) provided a good deal of the information noted below. Any opinions expressed are mine, not his, however.
Boston Public Library is, by and large, the mother library of all tax supported, open to all, libraries in this country. One can nibble around the edges of that statement, and there are some earlier examples of public libraries that come close to the modern idea. In the end, however, BPL was the first true modern public library, and certainly the one after which a large number of other libraries are modeled- administratively, if not architecturally.
The founding of BPL is an oft-told tale, and I will not repeat it here.
The original BPL 
building is not the familiar McKim design of 1895 on Copley
Square- now collocated with the somewhat less successful (IMHO) Phillip
Johnson addition of 1972. The McKim building underwent restoration in the
late 1990s. BPL has some nice material on the McKim building, and the restoration.
Click on the small image for a full sized version.
The
original building, pictured at right, was designed by Charles Kirk
Kirby, opened in 1858, and was located on Boylston Street. Library
service had been provided in 1854 or 1855 (the Report is not clear)
in apparently rented quarters on Mason Street not far from the
Boylston Street location. The cornerstone for the Boylston Street building
was laid on September 17, 1855, and the building opened for business exactly
three years later. Total cost, land included, was $365,000. The building
was designed to hold what Kenneth Breisch characterizes as an "unprecedented
240,000" volumes.
By July 1, 1875 it already held 223,470 volumes, the majority (176,555) in Bates Hall- about which more below. In common with other libraries on these pages even the unprecedented size of the planned for collection was insufficient, and the building was replaced in 1895.
The BPL article in the Report runs from page 863-872. There is no attribution, although one suspects the fine hand of Justin Winsor who was then Superintendent, having succeeded Charles Coffin Jewett in 1868. One interesting note is a table on expenditures:
| Salaries | $61,000 |
| Books and binding | $36,000 |
| Other | $26,000 |
| Total | $123,000 |
Undated photo of the Boylston Street building from the BPL page
The text notes:
In this apportionment the salary account is unusually large, and the book account, of course, proportionately small. This (at first sight undesirable) condition of things is, in great measure, due to two causes, viz:
... and goes on to justify the large staff. One can only observe that apparently even then money spent on the folks who make the library work was regarded as less important than money spent on the materials budget.
Bates Hall- First Iteration
One of the more interesting places in the McKim version of BPL is Bates Hall, which contains some wonderful barrel vaulting. The BPL page made the following statement about Bates Hall:
Acknowledged by many to be architecturally one of the most important rooms in the world, Bates Hall features a majestic barrel-arched ceiling enclosed by half domes on each end, English oak bookcases, busts of eminent authors and Bostonians, and a richly carved limestone balcony. The hall, located on the second floor of the McKim building, is named in honor of Joshua Bates, a London merchant banker born in Weymouth, MA, who in 1852 gave the Library $50,000 for the purchase of books.
I'm not so sure about the "...one of the most important rooms in the world" claim, but it is a handsome place.
Click on the small image for a full sized version.
What the BPL page does not mention is that there was a Bates Hall
in the Boylston Street building that is the subject of this page.
Bates Hall was the typical of the "book hall" concept of both storage
and delivery. The alcove system of storage echoes back to medieval libraries,
and magnificence, rather than practicality, was the goal of the architect.
Justin Winsor, who ran BPL from 1868-1877 complained that Bates Hall seemed
to be planned to "produce the largest instance of the smallest average
distance of books from the point of delivery." (Breisch, page 86)
Bates Hall is similar, conceptually, to the interiors at Cincinnati PL, and Wellesley College and any number of other large impressive reading rooms libraries have included over the years. Breisch directly links Bates Hall and the Cincinnati reading room (page 77).
Bates Hall was, in once sense, an expression of then modern library theory. It was also an expression of class distinctions among library users. Bates Hall held what we would now call the research collection. The Lower Hall (otherwise un-named) was intended for lighter reading, and was under direct control of a librarian. Kenneth Breisch on Bates Hall:
Still the dichotomy between the first and second floors of the building is significant. In the lower realm, middle- and working-class patrons were entirely segregated from the circulating collection... while the more privileged readers in the research collection were allowed to sit among the books in the manner of a private gentleman's library or Athenaeum.(page 77)
It is worth noting that several of the founders of BPL were members of the exclusive Boston Athenaeum and were, in several senses, creating a public version of that institution.
The Periodicals Room
Click on the small image for a full sized version.
What is labeled as the "Reading Room for Periodicals" in the Report
is probably part of the general reading room depicted on page 74 of Breisch.
This arrangement is echoed in the administrative structure of the library.
On page 868 of the report there is a brief paragraph on the departmental
structure- the periodicals room is not mentioned. Worth noting in the illustration
is the presence of women. The two in the foreground are fairly obvious,
and I think a third is pictured seated on the left hand side, to the right
of the gentleman holding a chair for the ladies in the foreground.
Breisch notes that Nathanial B. Shurtleff, a BPL trustee and member of the building commission had, in 1856 published A Decimal System for the Arrangement and Administration of Libraries. The inference is that many of Shurtleff's ideas became reality in the Boylston Street building. One of those ideas was a "smaller reading room which may be used exclusively by females.." Breisch notes that the "special reading room" illustrated in the plan on page 74 was, in fact, the exclusively female room. Nothing here precludes women in the main reading room, or periodicals room, and the illustration suggests that gender segregation may not have been very strict.