Day: February 9, 2009

“After nine years of planning and construction, and three years of exile off campus, on January 5th The Bancroft Library opened its doors again in the splendidly renovated Doe Annex Building, on the east side of the main library complex, facing the Campanile.

Bancroft is one of the great treasures of the Berkeley campus, a library even older than the university itself. It grew out of the reference collection that San Francisco book dealer and publisher Hubert Howe Bancroft began to form in 1860. Bancroft initially focused his collection on California in order to compile a guidebook for emigrants to the Golden State but soon expanded it to encompass the entire American West as well as Mexico and Central America.” – Charles Faulhaber, Director of The Bancroft Library

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UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library is a place where papyrus from ancient Egypt, pamphlets from the 1964 Free Speech Movement and photographs of the Gold Rush can all be found under one roof.

Now it’s also one of the spiffiest spots at Cal.

The 149-year-old library – renowned worldwide for its collection of primary sources on the history of California and the American West – recently reopened after a huge renovation that displaced it from campus in summer 2005 and scattered it to five temporary locations.

“We are enormously pleased with the aesthetics of the building,” said Bancroft Director Charles Faulhaber. “It works very well with the restrained Beaux-Arts exterior. The brass, marble, wood and limestone are richly elegant but not fussy. It makes a statement for our time and all time.” – Patricia Yollin, Chronicle Staff Writer

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