The North Street building, with its distinctive copper dome surmounted by Thomas Clapperton's bronze statue entitled Literature (often referred to as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom)[5] opened in 1911.

The building was gutted by fire on 26 October 1962, although the facade survived and was later incorporated into the 1980 extension of the Mitchell Library, with the principal entrance now being in Granville Street.

The Mitchell Library also holds the Glasgow City Archives and Special Collections which are considered to be one of the world's best resources for researching family history[10] and have featured in the television series Who Do You Think You Are?.

[12] The venue hosts a variety of theatre, music and spoken word events, including some during Glasgow's Celtic Connections and Aye Write!

[13][14][15] In Catherine Carswell's novel The Camomile (1922), Ellen Carstairs makes visits to the old Mitchell Library in Ingram Street where she reads the works of John Davidson, George Bernard Shaw's Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant, James Thomson's The City of Dreadful Night, Jude the Obscure (1895) and another novel by Thomas Hardy.