The history at Houghton
Harvard’s neo-Georgian Houghton Library, which occupies the first building at an American university designed to house rare books and manuscripts, was built in 1942 with a gift from Arthur A. Houghton Jr. ’29, and was quickly celebrated for its innovative climate-control, shelving, and air-filtration systems. Soon Houghton was a national model for similar archives. Houghton’s physical antecedent was Harvard’s fabled “Treasure Room” at the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library. This grand exhibition space opened in 1915, in what is now the Periodicals Reading Room. Literary and historical gems went on rotating display there, including quarto editions of Shakespeare and first-edition works by John Milton. The Treasure Room was expanded in 1929 when gifts of rare books to the University seemed to come in a sudden flood. But by 1938 Harvard library director Keyes D. Metcalf was lobbying for a separate space for Harvard’s rarities, in part of his campaign to decentralize collections...