The Library’s Heyday: 1933-1977

In 1932, the north portion of the Old Main Building, an auditorium above a library, was razed, and on its footprint, work began on the first section of what would become the current Main Building and Tower. This new E-shaped structure abutting Old Main on the south went by a variety of names, such as the New Library Building 2, but mostly was called the Library Extension.

The Library Extension included the entire north half of what is now the Main Building, including the grand reading rooms and delivery room now known as the Life Science Library, as well as the first 10 floors of the Tower, which housed the library's books, known as the stacks. These 10 floors reached from the ground to only the top of the Main Building and therefore did not yet form a tower.

The opening of the building in 1933 prompted an ingathering of various collections that had been growing across campus. The Garcia Library, which would form the core of UT's world-famous Latin American collection, would move from Battle Hall to the west reading room on the third floor, and just as it did, it got a memorable addition: the death mask of the collection's namesake, writer and collector Genaro Garcia, who had just died. The collection's director, Carlos Castañeda, whose name will be familiar to UT students and alumni who spent time at the Perry-Castañeda Library, announced the mask would be mounted and displayed in a special glass case in the reading room of the Garcia Library.

The groundwork was being laid for other collections to move to the new building. In 1934, the Seminole Sentinel reported, "When the front unit of the new library on the campus has been completed, it is proposed that the Wrenn, Aitkin and Stark collections be housed in that building, making it one of the most beautiful libraries in the world." The Wrenn and Stark collections would help constitute the bulk of Rare Books Collection in what is now the President's Office on the fourth floor. The exquisite east room of this suite is still known as the Stark Library.

In 1936, the University Newspaper Library, which had been in the attic of Sutton Hall since "the World War," came in. "The 20,000 newspapers stacked to the rafters of Sutton Hall and scattered around campus in other buildings will occupy part of three floors of the new building," wrote The Daily Texan. "E.R. Dabney, newspaper librarian, said that, instead of graduate students having to hunt out their files in the gloom of the attic and to carry their volumes to the tables under the light, they will have twenty-four individual tables with adjustable tops so that newspaper file can be adjusted to the eye." The article went on to brag that an elevator would be used to carry volumes from one floor to another.