An 18th-century engraving of the Bibliotheksrotunde

Round reading rooms: the architectural history of the Herzog August Bibliothek and the Radcliffe Camera

The Herzog August Bibliothek at Wolfenbüttel, in the modern state of Lower Saxony, can trace its origins back to 1572, when a library was established by Julius, Duke of Braunschweig-Lüneburg (1528-89). He was a significant patron of learning, founding a university (the Academia Julia) in an abandoned monastery in the nearby town of Helmstedt, and building a new aula (auditorium) and ancillary buildings on the monastic site in 1592-7.1 Following the partition of the Duchy in 1635, and the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, the library in Wolfenbüttel was greatly enlarged and catalogued by Duke August (1579-1666), after whom it is named; by 1666 it contained some 35,000 volumes. Duke August had studied as a young man at the universities of Rostock and Tübingen, and subsequently went on a Grand Tour which took him, among other places, to England. He housed the books in a large rectangular room above the stable block next to the ducal palace (Residenz) at Wolfenbüttel.2 An engraving of 1650 by Conrad Buno shows the Duke standing inside it, each wall lined with eight shelves, the upper ones reached by ladders; other books were placed in a lower ‘island’ stack in the middle of the room, which was entered through an elaborately carved wooden doorcase.

A 17th-century engraving of Duke August in his library (Conrad Buno, 1650). Image: Herzog August Bibliothek
A 17th-century engraving of Duke August in his library (Conrad Buno, 1650). Image: Herzog August Bibliothek

The decision to replace Duke August’s library was taken by Duke Anthony Ulrich (1633-1714) following his reinstatement in 1704 after being deposed for allying with France during the War of the Spanish Succession. From 1690 the librarian was the philosopher, mathematician and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). One of the founders of modern library science, he wrote a pamphlet on the arrangement of libraries,3 and he argued in a letter written on 8 May 1716, shortly before his death, that bookcases should be arranged in such a way that ladders would not be needed to reach the upper shelves.4 His ideas for an innovative new free-standing building at Wolfenbüttel were approved, and it went up in 1706-10 in a setting close to the Residenz;5 the architect was the royal Building Administrator (Bauverwalter) Hermann Korb (1656-1735), who had been trained as a carpenter and was responsible for numerous other buildings within the Duchy.6

An 18th-century engraving of the Bibliotheksrotunde. Image: Herzog August Bibliothek
An 18th-century engraving of the Bibliotheksrotunde. Image: Herzog August Bibliothek

Externally plain, 127-5 ft. long and 95 ft. wide, and three storeys high, the new library’s most notable feature was its central oval-shaped rotunda on the first floor, built of timber and lit from above by round-arched attic windows;7 one later writer commented that it surprised the visitor with its good proportions.8 It contained the main reading room, which was surrounded by two storeys of galleries containing the bookshelves. They were placed in alcoves behind the piers supporting the dome, each of which was adorned with painted pilasters of the classical Orders (Tuscan Doric, Ionic, Corinthian and Composite in ascending order); the ceiling was painted with allegorical figures of classical deities and symbols of the planets. Readers consulted the books at a central table, and five-sided rooms at each corner of the surrounding rectangular structure housed the ‘rarer and choicer books’, manuscripts and catalogues.9 A pedimented projection on the main façade housed the entrance lobby and the staircase hall which gave access to the reading room and the upper floors. An oval-shaped lantern projected upwards from the roof, its windows giving light to the central hall; the original intention was to place a model of a celestial globe at the summit of the dome, but it was omitted for fear that its weight would endanger the stability of the timber substructure.10

A photograph of the interior of the Bibliotheksrotunde. Image: Herzog August Bibliothek
A photograph of the interior of the Bibliotheksrotunde. Image: Herzog August Bibliothek

The Wolfenbüttel library seems to have been the first purpose-built domed library in Europe, and possibly the world. Some thirty years earlier, in about 1675, Christopher Wren had proposed a domed circular library for Trinity College, Cambridge, with layers of shelves around the rotunda, which would have been supported by giant Corinthian columns.11 But in the end a more conventionally rectangular-shaped building went up on the proposed site at the western end of Nevile’s Court, and Wren’s drawings of the circular scheme were not engraved or published. It seems therefore that the Wolfenbüttel design, as conceived by Leibniz and executed by Korb, was an original one, drawing probably on the rich legacy of Renaissance and Baroque domed rotundas and oval-shaped buildings in Italy and the German-speaking lands.

Ground plan of the Bibliotheksrotunde. Image: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum
Ground plan of the Bibliotheksrotunde. Image: Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum

Whatever its origins, the Wolfenbüttel library set a precedent for other centrally-planned libraries. Johann Fischer von Erlach’s magnificent Hofbibliothek in Vienna (1722-6), also rectangular in plan, has an oval, domed and top-lit central rotunda at its centre. And as early as 1713, or thereabouts, Nicholas Hawksmoor prepared designs for a circular library to be attached to Selden End at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in order to house books promised from the intended legacy of the wealthy physician John Radcliffe. Radcliffe died in 1714, and in the following year Hawksmoor produced designs for a massive circular library on a square base which would have been built against the south wall of the Schools Quadrangle. Hawksmoor went on to commission a wooden model of a revised version of this design,12 but he died in 1736 – the year in which the money from the Radcliffe bequest became available – and the commission reverted to James Gibbs, the designer of the building now known as the Radcliffe Camera, which went up on a detached site in what is now called Radcliffe Square in 1737-48. There is no evidence that Gibbs knew about the Wolfenbüttel library, but he was being trained in Rome, in the office of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s pupil Carlo Fontana, at the time of its construction, and his design, though built on a larger scale and constructed in stone, drew upon common Renaissance and Baroque sources. The Radcliffe Camera had a central open area, like that of the Wolfenbüttel library – though circular and not oval-shaped - and the books were housed on shelves in the galleries surrounding it: a plan which was criticised by some commentators on the grounds of extravagance and wasted space.13

The Radcliffe Camera. Image: Emma Stanford
The Radcliffe Camera. Image: Emma Stanford

Similar criticisms, together with structural inadequacies, must have played a part in the decision to demolish Korb’s library at Wolfenbüttel and to replace it by the present, more conventional Neo-Renaissance building in 1886. But centrally-planned libraries have continued to be built: the British Museum domed reading room in London in 1854-7; the reading room of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (1886-92); Stockholm Public Library (1924-8); the Central Public Library in Manchester (1930-4); the Central Library in Vancouver, Canada (1993-5); and, on a much smaller scale, the Sackler Library in Oxford (1997-2001), a cylindrical book stack with desks for readers around the outer edge. Meanwhile the Radcliffe Camera continues to function as Oxford University’s History Faculty Library, used by hundreds of readers and embodying the distant memory of the German library that preceded it, and which still flourishes in Wolfenbüttel.

Geoffrey Tyack is a member of the Oxford University History Faculty, emeritus fellow of Kellogg College, and President of the Oxfordshire Architectural and Historical Society. He has published extensively on the architectural history of Oxford.


  1. R. Kirwan, Empowerment and Representation at… Helmstedt and Wurzburg (Wolfenbüttel 2009), pp. 174-182. The university declined after the foundation of the University of Göttingen, and closed in 1810, but some of its buildings survive. [return]
  2. A. Hobson, Great Libraries (1970), p. 207. [return]
  3. Leibniz, Opera Omnia (Geneva, 1768), vol. 5, pp. 209-14; H.G. Schulte-Albert, ‘Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Library Classification’, Journal of Library History 6/2 (April, 1971), pp. 133-152. [return]
  4. H. Reuther, ‘Das Gebäude der … Bibliothek zu Wolfenbüttel’, in W. Totok and C. Haan, Leibniz: Sein Leben, sein Werken, seine Welt (Hannover, 1966), pp. 355-6. [return]
  5. The building is discussed at length in Reuther, loc.cit., pp. 349-357. See also N. Pevsner, History of Building Types (1976), pp. 98-9; J.P.A. Campbell, The Library: a World History (2015), p. 147 [return]
  6. See W. Kelsch, Hermann Korb. Barockbaumeister am Wolfenbütteler Fürstenhof (Braunschweig, 1985). They include the centrally-planned Baroque St-Trinitaskirche (1716-18) at Wolfenbüttel. [return]
  7. An elevation, cross-section and plan were published in 1766. They are reproduced in Reuther, loc.cit. [return]
  8. Petzholdt, Handbuch Deutscher Bibliotheken (1853), p. 402. [return]
  9. E. Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries (1859), pp. 680-1. [return]
  10. It is shown in one of the 1766 engravings, with the comment that it would have been too heavy (‘puisque le batiment en etoit trop chargé’). A copper globe, supported by figures of Atlas and Hercules, was placed on the apex of the roof of of the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford in 1794. [return]
  11. Wren’s drawings of both schemes are preserved in the library of All Souls College, Oxford: A. Geraghty, The Architectural Drawings of Sir Christopher Wren at All Souls College (Aldershot, 2007), pp. 30-41. [return]
  12. It survives in the Bodleian’s collections (Library Objects 616): for the complicated prehistory of the design, see S. Hebron, Dr Radcliffe’s Library (Oxford, 2014). [return]
  13. See for instance Edwards, Memoirs of Libraries, p. 682. [return]