Thompson Memorial Library

When Vassar opened in 1865, the library was a mere single room in Main with a collection of only three thousand books.

Architecturally, the style of the building is Perpendicular Gothic, and is constructed from Germantown stone with Indiana limestone trimming.

[1] The general plan of the building, as designed by Francis R. Allen and his associate Charles Collens, is three wings built about a central tower.

Yale, Harvard, Oxford, and Cambridge all started as male institutions and their seals are on the edges of the library tower, representing pillars.

Below the frieze of seals in the central hall hang five seventeenth-century Flemish Gobelin tapestries portraying Apuleius' romance of Cupid and Psyche.

Situating the Cloisters at the heart of the library—it is on the second floor just south of Thompson's central axis—was a deliberate affirmation of Vassar's commitment to the importance of place in education.