[2] Situated on Yale University's Hewitt Quadrangle, the building was designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and completed in 1963.

Its six-story above-ground glass-enclosed tower of book stacks is encased by a windowless façade, supported by four monolithic piers at the corners of the building.

The exterior shell is structurally supported by a steel frame with pylons embedded 50 feet (15 m) to bedrock at each corner pier, and the façade is constructed of translucent veined marble and granite.

The marble was quarried from Danby, Vermont, and milled to a thickness of 1.25 inches (32 mm) in order to allow filtered daylight to permeate the interior in a subtle golden amber glow.

[11] An elevated public exhibition mezzanine surrounds the glass stack tower, and displays among other things, one of the 48 extant copies of the Gutenberg Bible.

The collection consists largely of correspondence and documents from the colonial, revolutionary, Federal, and antebellum periods, extending well into the postbellum era.

[22] There were two full-year exhibitions that explored the library's architecture and people as well as a series of showcases of rarely seen manuscripts, printed works, and visual objects from across all curatorial areas.

[1] Security measures were significantly increased after the well-known antiques dealer Edward Forbes Smiley III was caught cutting maps from rare books with an X-acto blade in 2005.

Smiley's scheme was discovered when he dropped his concealed tool in the reading room, and he subsequently served several years in prison for thefts of rare documents valued in millions of dollars from the Beinecke and other libraries.

[24] The library operates under a closed stack system, and rigorous security rules now allow carefully controlled access to materials under video surveillance.

[27] After an infestation of the death watch beetle was discovered in 1977, the Beinecke Library helped pioneer the non-toxic method of controlling paper-eating pests by freezing books and documents at −33 °F (−36 °C) for three days.