I like Butler Library on the campus of Columbia University. Make that love. Especially in summer. On the hottest days I head to Butler, where air conditioning, the ornamental ceilings, the portraits of Columbia’s leaders who gaze out from centuries past and the knowledge that two million volumes lie within reach offer both an invitation to ideas and a sense of repose.
In the main reading room the table lamps glow yellow and daylight fills the room. The place sounds lovely: fingers scroll on computer mice and MacBooks snap shut and people’s sandals clack across the tile floor.
The other day a girl across a table from me put down a cup of ice that made a satisfying pop. She wore a brick red shirt and typed on a MacBook Pro encased in a sleeve of the same color.
A guy to her right who wore a blue t-shirt closed a hardcover book with a soft thud. Someone’s muted iPhone buzzed. The air hummed. A man at the reference desk in a black t-shirt and madras shorts spoke in hushed tones with a librarian who wore a coral-colored sweater.
The acoustics of Butler have captivated others. One blogger, Gustavo Val, took his microphone to Butler’s Milstein reading room, where he recorded the “silent” environment:
“Additionally, other irregular sounds are present in this environment: the sound of someone getting up, someone coughing, footsteps over the marble floor, zippers, and the click of an opening door. Focusing our attention further other subtle sounds appear in our recording: the sound of turning pages and of fingers typing a computer keyboard.”
I bring long sleeves to ward off Butler’s chill, which is the opposite of my apartment, where the air grows hot and stale and my MacBook overheats and the city assaults me aurally.
Butler, with its Italian Renaissance design, opened in 1934. The building was financed by Edward Harkness, a harness maker and philanthropist who was among the early investors in Standard Oil, and designed by James Gamble Rogers. The building was initially called South Hall but later renamed in honor of Nicholas Murray Butler, who served as the Columbia’s president from 1902 to 1945.
At Butler’s core stands a 15-level stack of steel shelves that rises six floors. Inside the stacks “there is the deep quiet of protection and near-abandonment,” wrote Ben Ratliff, a music critic for the New York Times, who also counts Butler among his summer places. According to Ratliff:
“You hear the hum of the lights, turned on as needed; that’s it. There’s a phone to make outgoing calls on the fifth floor. To me the stacks are the most sacred space in the library, yet here nobody’s telling you not to talk. You’re on your own. It’s a situation for adults.”
Butler’s stacks make Ratliff “dopily happy,” which describes my feeling about the library generally. In the span of a few hours recently I pored over a history of New York State, discovered a two-volume set of Thoreau’s writings, flipped through a biography of Roger Williams and glanced at an atlas of the world.
Author Herman Wouk, who graduated from Columbia the year Butler opened, called the university a place of “doubled magic,” where “the best things of the moment were outside the rectangle of Columbia; the best things of all human history and thought were inside the rectangle.”
Butler embodies that magic. Buzzfeed recently ranked the library one of the 49 most breathtaking in the world.
I cannot imagine a more extraordinary place to be. “Outside it’s 100F,” a Butler partisan named Therese Grinceri tweeted on Friday. “Inside it’s lovely and cool @ Butler Library.”