Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library
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The Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library is part of Columbia University's library system. It collects books and periodicals in architecture, historic preservation, art history, painting, sculpting, graphic arts, decorative arts, city planning, real estate, and archaeology. The architectural and fine arts collection are non-circulating. The Ware Collection, mainly books on urban planning and real estate development, do circulate.
The Avery Library is named for Henry Ogden Avery, one of New York's promising young architects in the late 19th century and a friend of William Robert Ware, who founded the Department of Architecture at Columbia in 1881. A few weeks after Avery's early death in 1890, his parents established the library as a memorial to their son. They offered his collection of 2,000 books, mostly in architecture, archaeology, and the decorative arts, many of his original drawings, as well as funds to round out the book collection, and an endowment to help the library grow. As of today, the Library now contains more than 250,000 volumes and receives approximately 1,500 periodicals.
The Avery collection in architecture is among the largest in the world; it ranges from the first Western printed book on architecture, De re aedificatoria (1485), by Leone Battista Alberti, to the classics of modernism by Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Avery's drawing and manuscript collection holds 400,000 drawings and original records. Most of the library's inventory is referenced in a database known as the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, used throughout the world.
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