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In 1835 Delassert proposed for the French National Library a circular plan of building, which perhaps suggested the present reading room of the British Museum. In 1885 Magnusson proposed an unending whorl as a good form for a growing library.[9]

While English libraries, and those of the continent, were developing these phases of old types, separate library buildings began to appear in America. The first one actually erected for library occupation still remains in use,—the Redwood Library of Newport, R. I., built in 1750. The main room is a hall 37 × 26 feet, 19 feet high, with two lean-to rooms at the sides. A massive portico gives an impressive front, but cannot be said to found a distinctive library style.

Our early proprietary associations and parochial libraries were stored in public buildings, or in buildings with no peculiar features. The school district libraries established by the state of New York in 1835, and similar libraries founded soon after in other states, seem to have been stored in schoolhouses, though intended for public use. The state libraries, first established as early as 1773, were deposited in the State Houses. The Young Men’s libraries of the early period were kept in rented rooms, or at best in rented houses. No special phase of library buildings was developed until about the middle of the nineteenth century, when colleges began to build. Gore Hall at Harvard (1841) was modeled after King’s College Chapel at Cambridge, Eng., and was even at that date said to be “ill adapted to the purposes of a library.” The University of North Carolina “erected” in 1850 a library in the form of a Greek temple, with hall 84 × 32 feet, 20 feet high. These essays at importing styles certainly developed no models worth imitation, but nevertheless they were imitated.