and impresses upon the visitor the memorial character 
of the building. At the end of the hall and in convenient relation 
to the catalogue room at the side is the delivery desk, the 
central control and distributing point on the ground floor. 
Additional reading rooms occupy flanking wings on High 
Street, while the Wall Street side is largely given over to 
exhibition, lecture, and study rooms. York Street, the noisiest
approach and one which will eventually offer the least 
possibilities of a vista, is assigned to working space. Thus, the 
principal rooms of public character and the work rooms are 
placed on the first floor, a distinctive feature of the Yale Library which makes easier the supervision of the stack and 
special rooms for graduate scholars and faculty. For the 
convenience of readers, the first floor is not arrived at by a 
monumental flight of stairs, but is entered at a level two feet above 
High Street.
       With the plan and external mass of the building determined, the style decided upon was Gothic as in the Harkness 
Memorial Quadrangle, but a Gothic of simpler planes and 
greater monumentality more in keeping with the purposes 
of the building. The freshness of the detail and the severity 
of the mass bespeak a Gothic which is distinctly of the present
day, but which relies where possible upon the principles 
of true stone arch construction of the past. The book tower 
which is built upon a steel framework frankly belies its 
medieval character by the flatness of its buttressing and 
emerges a superb piece of modern Gothic design, half tower 
and half building. The scale and simplicity of the detail give 
breadth and power to the mass. The decoration, which on the 
structural walls is restrained, runs riot at the top on leaded 
battlements.
       It is a tribute to the design of the Entrance Hall that 
it stands before the tower without appearing insignificant. 
Combining the form of a memorial chapel to the founder 
with an abstract and monumental quality appropriate to the 
entrance of a great library, the effect of the façade is powerful