The Mitchell Library

The Mitchell Library is one of the largest public reference libraries in Europe — well over a million volumes gathered beneath a great green copper dome, on which a bronze figure of Literature stands guard over Charing Cross. Born of a tobacco fortune and a bachelor’s bequest, it has grown from a few thousand books in a rented city-centre room into one of the supreme monuments of Glasgow’s faith in learning — a vast civic library, free and open to all, that has served the city for close on a century and a half.

This page tells its story: the fortune that founded it, its first modest home, the great building on North Street, the dome that crowns it, the scale of its holdings, its famous collections, and its life today.

A tobacco fortune

The library owes its existence, and its name, to Stephen Mitchell, a wealthy tobacco manufacturer whose family firm, Stephen Mitchell & Son, was one of the oldest in the trade and would later become a founding branch of the Imperial Tobacco Company. Mitchell had inherited a business begun by his forebears in West Lothian in the eighteenth century, and had moved it to Glasgow, then the heart of a great tobacco and manufacturing economy. A bachelor with no direct heirs, he died in 1874, and left the bulk of his estate — a sum approaching £70,000, a fortune in its day — to found a large public library in Glasgow, freely open to all, ‘with all the modern accessories connected therewith’. It was a gift of extraordinary foresight, and the making of one of the city’s greatest institutions.

The first Mitchell

The Mitchell Library first opened its doors in November 1877, occupying two floors of a building at the corner of Ingram Street in what is now the Merchant City. Its opening stock was modest — some fifteen to seventeen thousand volumes, gathered from donations and the purchase of a few private collections — but the library answered a deep public hunger, and it grew with astonishing speed. Within seven years the stock had quadrupled, and by 1891 the collection had outgrown its home and ‘flitted’ to larger premises in Miller Street. These too soon proved inadequate, and it became clear that the city’s reference library, already a national resource, needed a permanent home built for the purpose.

The building on North Street

In 1904 the corporation resolved to build, and launched an architectural competition for a new Mitchell Library on a site at North Street, by Charing Cross. The winning design was by the architect William B. Whitie, and in September 1907 the foundation stone was laid by none other than Andrew Carnegie, the Dunfermline-born steel magnate and the greatest library benefactor of the age. Four years later, in October 1911, the new Mitchell Library opened — the grand, domed building that generations of Glaswegians have known and loved ever since. Built in a confident Edwardian Baroque manner, all pale stone and civic swagger, it was a fitting home for a library that had become one of the proudest expressions of the public spirit of the Second City of the Empire.

The dome & the reading rooms

The building’s most famous feature is its great dome, sheathed in copper long since weathered to a soft green, which rises above Charing Cross as one of the landmarks of the Glasgow skyline. On its summit stands a bronze figure by the sculptor Thomas Clapperton, entitled Literature but universally known as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom, who has kept watch over the streaming traffic below for more than a century. Within, the building lives up to its exterior: a fine marble and stone staircase, elaborate plasterwork and joinery, and above all the great reading rooms, hushed and top-lit, where scholars, students and the merely curious have bent over books for generations.

A million volumes

From its modest beginnings the collection has swelled into one of the largest of its kind anywhere, long claimed as the biggest public reference library in Europe, with well over a million volumes and, counted with its lending stock, a total approaching two million items. Books are only the beginning: the Mitchell holds newspapers and journals, maps and photographs, manuscripts and microforms, a vast accumulated memory of the city and the wider world. For much of its life the reference collection was strictly non-lending, a library to be consulted rather than borrowed from — a treasure-house of knowledge held in trust for the whole community, exactly as its founder had wished.

The Burns collection & the archives

Among its holdings are collections of national importance. The Mitchell is home to what is reckoned the largest Robert Burns collection in the world, a treasury of the national poet’s works, letters and early editions. It houses, too, the Glasgow City Archives, the records of the city reaching back to the twelfth century that make it the essential starting point for anyone tracing the story of the city — or their own family within it, for the library’s family-history and local-history resources, held in its renowned Special Collections, draw researchers from across the globe. Further gifts, including material associated with the grocery magnate Sir Thomas Lipton, have added to a collection that is, in effect, the documentary conscience of Glasgow.

The Mitchell today

The Mitchell has never stopped growing. A large extension was added to the west of the original building between the late 1970s and early 1980s, greatly increasing its space and incorporating the Mitchell Theatre — built into the surviving frontage of the old St Andrew’s Halls, the great Victorian concert rooms that had been gutted by fire in 1962. Today the library, run by Glasgow Life on the city’s behalf, is far more than a store of books: a place of exhibitions, events and public gatherings, of family-history classes and quiet study alike, still free and still open to all. Nearly a hundred and fifty years after a tobacco manufacturer’s bequest, the Mitchell remains what he intended — the great public library of Glasgow, and one of the finest in the land.

The essentials