The bulk of the initial library collection consisted of a gift, in 1907, from H.M. Stationery Office of “some hundreds of massive quarto volumes of The Anglo Saxon Chronicle, et hoe genus omne – the famous ‘Rolls Series”.

[4] The end of the Great Depression enabled the university to build the centre portion of the main block, whose upper floor (under the clock tower) was allocated to the library, into which it moved in 1937.

The foundation-stone was laid by Jan Hofmeyer, then Minister of Education, and it dutifully records in elegant Latin that once more the Rhodes Trust had contributed generously to the cost of the building”.

[4] This decision was almost certainly influenced by the prospect of the valuable space the library would release once it moved out of the main building as there was a "great shortage of classroom and study accommodation throughout the university".

Declared officially opened on the afternoon of Saturday 8 April 1961 by Lady Schonland, wife of the Chancellor of the University, it was considered one of the finest of its kind in Africa.

Launched in 1972 at the instigation of Professor Guy Butler, Karin de Jager[7] recalls that the "fledgling Thomas Pringle Collection was housed in the only available open space in the Rhodes Library – for unknown reasons dubbed The Priest’s Hole.

"All too rapidly" wrote Malcolm Hacksley, "the Collection had outgrown its first home and ... it moved from Rhodes University into its present premises in the “Priest’s House” in Beaufort Street.

Additional donations received, coupled with physical building challenges, led to Council approving a decision to house the Cory collections in the Eden Grove complex as a separate research facility.