Sterling Memorial Library is the main library building of the Yale University Library system in New Haven, Connecticut. Opened in 1931, the library was designed by James Gamble Rogers as the centerpiece of Yale's Gothic Revival campus. It is elaborately ornamented, featuring extensive sculpture and painting as well as hundreds of panes of stained glass created by G. Owen Bonawit. In addition to five large reading rooms, a Music Library, and courtyard on the ground floor, the library's tower has sixteen levels of bookstacks containing over 4 million volumes. It connects via tunnel to the underground Bass Library, which contains an additional 150,000 volumes.HistoryFor the ninety years prior to the construction of Sterling Memorial Library, Yale's library collections had been held in the College Library, a chapel-like Gothic Revival building on Yale's Old Campus now known as Dwight Hall. Built to house a collection of 40,000 books in the 1840s, and later expanded to Linsly Hall and Chittenden Hall, the old library could not hold Yale's swelling book collection, which had grown to over one million volumes. In 1918, Yale received a $17-million bequest from John W. Sterling, founder of the New York law firm Shearman & Sterling, providing that Yale construct "at least one enduring, useful and architecturally beautiful edifice." The largest bequest in the history of any American university, it initiated a major period of construction on Yale's central campus. Because of the library collection's growth, the university decided to make the centerpiece of Sterling's gift a new library with a capacity for 3.5 million volumes.
