The Doe Memorial Library is the main

library A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a vir ...

of the

University of California, Berkeley Library System Thirty-one constituent and affiliated libraries combine to make the library system of the University of California, Berkeley the seventh largest research library by number of volumes in the United States. As of 2021, Berkeley's library system ho ...

. The library is named after its benefactor, Charles Franklin Doe, who in 1904

bequeathed A bequest is property given by will. Historically, the term ''bequest'' was used for personal property given by will and ''deviser'' for real property. Today, the two words are used interchangeably. The word ''bequeath'' is a verb form for the ...

funds for its construction. It is located near the center of the

Berkeley campus The campus of the University of California, Berkeley and its surrounding community are home to a number of notable buildings by early 20th-century campus architect John Galen Howard, his peer Bernard Maybeck (best known for the San Francisco Pala ...

, facing Memorial Glade, and is adjacent to and physically connected with the

Bancroft Library The Bancroft Library in the center of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, is the university's primary special-collections library. It was acquired from its founder, Hubert Howe Bancroft, in 1905, with the proviso that it retai ...

. In 1900,

Émile Bénard Henri Jean Émile Bénard (June 23, 1844 – October 15, 1929) was a French architect and painter. Bénard was the winner of the 1899 International Competition for the Phoebe A. Hearst Architectural Plan to design the campus of the University o ...

won an architectural competition for the design of the library, and the Neoclassical-style building was completed in 1911. The Doe Library building is the gateway to the underground Gardner (Main) Stacks, named in honor of

David P. Gardner David Pierpont Gardner (born March 24, 1933) was the 15th president of the University of California and was also the president of the University of Utah. Biography Gardner was born in Berkeley, California, to Reed S. Gardner and Margaret Pierpont ...

, the 15th President of the University of California. The library is home to the Mark Twain Papers, an extensive collection of the private manuscripts, sketches, essays, poems, notes, photographs and letters of

Samuel Clemens Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has pr ...

’ works as Twain. At the library's entrance is a statue of Clemens holding a copy of ''

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' or as it is known in more recent editions, ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'', is a novel by American author Mark Twain, which was first published in the United Kingdom in December 1884 and in the United St ...

,'' sculpted by

Gary Lee Price “My passion for art and my belief that art empowers and lifts the human spirit has only grown stronger throughout my life. I have been blessed with many generous and selfless mentors, and my dream is to pass those gifts on to others”. To t ...

. The statue is commonly mistaken for

Albert Einstein Albert Einstein ( ; ; 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German-born theoretical physicist, widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest and most influential physicists of all time. Einstein is best known for developing the theory ...

, with whom Twain shared a likeness.

Gardner (Main) Stacks Collection

The Gardner (Main) Stacks is a four-story underground structure consisting of 52 miles of bookshelves, most of which are

mobile shelving Mobile shelving, mobile aisle shelving, compactus, roller racking, or rolling stack, are terms applied to shelving or storage units fitted with wheeled traction systems. Units can be closely packed when access is not required, but can be readily ...

. It is home to 2.3 million of the 4.5 million volumes in Doe Library's research collection; the rest are stored off-campus at the Northern Regional Library Facility in Richmond. The Main Stacks is home to most of UC Berkeley's books covering the arts, humanities, and social sciences, although collections for certain specific fields (e.g., East Asian history) are housed separately in other libraries on campus. The Main Stacks were constructed in 1997 with four large skylights to allow for natural lighting of the underground structure. It is located immediately in front of the Doe Library building, underneath Doe's entrance plaza and a significant portion of Memorial Glade (all of which were dug up during the mid-1990s and then later rebuilt). The main entrance to the Gardner (Main) Stacks is through Doe, but the stacks are also connected to nearby

Moffitt Library The James K. Moffitt Undergraduate Library, simply known as Moffitt Library, is a library situated at the crossroads of the University of California, Berkeley, designed by American activist John Carl Warnecke in the late 1960s as a cutting-edge ...

by means of an underground hallway to form a single gigantic library complex. Because Doe's regular circulating collection is now stored underground in the Main Stacks, Doe's aboveground building is now visited primarily for its large reading rooms and to access non-circulating reference collections. Prior to the construction of the Main Stacks, Doe Library's book collections were stored inside the main building in a central space called the ''Doe Core''. Since then, this space has been used for temporary libraries displaced under

seismic retrofitting Seismic retrofitting is the modification of existing built environment, structures to make them more resistant to seismology, seismic activity, ground motion, or soil failure due to earthquakes. With better understanding of seismic demand on stru ...

on the Berkeley campus. Doe Core is 70 feet tall. File:Doe Library - detail entrance 2.jpg, Detail of the entrance and the pediment File:Doe Library - detail West.jpg, West part of the main facade. File:UCB Doe Memorial Library oblique view dllu.jpg, Three quarter view of the East and North facades.

References

External links

Doe Memorial Library
{{Authority control Library buildings completed in 1911 University and college academic libraries in the United States Libraries on the National Register of Historic Places in California National Register of Historic Places in Berkeley, California Neoclassical architecture in California University of California, Berkeley buildings Federal depository libraries Libraries in Alameda County, California 1911 establishments in California