24                                Adolf K. Placzek

who served from 1934 to 1945, and James Grote Van Derpool,
from 1946 to 1959—grcAv at a pace not envisioned even by the
founders. From the 2,000 vohimcs in 1890 the library developed
to 50,000 in 1954. In the years of my own stewardship, beginning
 

The reading room in 1912 as designed by Charles Follen AlcI'Cim.

in i960, it has more than doubled to its present 110,000. In 1921,
the art books of the Avery Library were set up as a separate branch
library of Avery, located in Schermerhorn Hall and named the
Fine Arts Library. Its growth, too, has been remarkable: 20,000
volumes in 1954, nearly 60,000 in 1977. Contributing decisively
to Avery's present preeminence was the fact that no momentum .
was lost during the war and post-war years, when so many Euro¬
pean libraries came to a standstill in their development and suffered
painful and sometimes irremediable gaps in the coverage of those
years.

Thus, by 1954, the need for added space had become desperately