In 1889, a group of prominent Johannesburg residents met to discuss the formation of a public library and eventually formed a committee to raise funds, find a building and order the books.

[5]: 40  In October 1899, the Second Anglo-Boer War broke out and the librarian and most of the English inhabitants of Johannesburg fled the Transvaal but a Boer burgher was asked to take care of the library and when the British under Lord Roberts retook the town in 1900, he reopened it and ran until the librarian could return.

[5]: 40 With British management of the Transvaal Colony after 1902, the Johannesburg Town Council was formed and they offered to take control of the library but the members refused but did accept a grant from the council for a free reading room with a limited number of free memberships.

[3] It was closed in 2009 for three years of extensive modernisation by conservation architect, Jonathan Stone and renovated by Fikile Construction.

The renovation was funded with a conditional grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York of $2-million, and the City of Johannesburg itself spent a further R55-million on the project.

[3] The construction of the Johannesburg Public Library took place between 1931 and 1935 and was the result of an architectural competition won by Cape Town architect John Perry.

The northern and southern facades are decorated with stone medallions each carved by Peter Kirchhoff with the face of a great literary, scientific, or philosophical figure.

Larger figures designed by Moses Kottler, representing literature, music, architecture, medicine, philosophy, and history surround the building.

[1] The library collection consists of about 1.5 million items of some 700,000 books and includes DVDs, CDs, sheet music and periodicals.