You may have noticed in past blogs that we commented on visiting a sizable number of really ornate libraries with buildings that looked like castles or churches, and you may also have noticed our wondering about why and wherefore. Well Cara List, the rare book librarian at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, finally explained it to us. The style is called Collegiate Gothic, and it was an attempt by young universities in the USA to create "a scholastic atmosphere" and gain credibility by emulating the libraries of the more venerable and esteemed universities in England, like the ones at Cambridge or Oxford.
Of course there are may non-gothic university libraries. For example the next library we visited after Northwestern was Chicago University. Leave it to the campus where the A bomb got its start with the first controlled nuclear chain reaction to build a library that looks like a space ship.
