John Hay Library

The story

Andrew Carnegie gave Brown $150,000 in 1906 for a new library and asked that it carry the name of his friend John Hay - Lincoln's wartime private secretary, later Secretary of State under McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, and the Brown class poet who took his master's here in 1858. Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge drew it in Beaux-Arts and built it in white marble quarried at Dorset, Vermont; it opened September 24, 1910, was dedicated that November 10, and grew a red-brick Georgian north wing in 1939. It was the University Library until the Rockefeller went up in 1964, and has held Brown's special collections ever since - some three million items across more than 250 of them.

The Lovecraft material began arriving a few months after his death in 1937 and has been added to by gift and purchase ever since; it is now the largest such holding anywhere, with more than 2,000 original letters and manuscripts of his essays, fiction and poetry plus over 1,000 books and magazines in twenty languages. It shares the building with the only surviving manuscript of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Thoreau's own books and journal manuscripts, a Shakespeare First Folio, early Copernicus and Galileo, and the Anne S.K. Brown Military Collection with its ranks of miniature soldiers.

Then there are the four books bound in human skin, acquired in the 1960s as alumni gifts and confirmed by testing in April 2015: a fourth-edition Vesalius anatomy, two editions of the Dance of Death (1816 and 1898), and a novel called Mademoiselle Giraud, My Wife. Brown now treats them as human remains and restricts access, so you read them as scans in the Brown Digital Repository while the objects stay put. Lovecraft's paper is the opposite proposition - request it and a staff member carries it to your table.