The institution and its library are found in the east wing of a neo-classical building at the southern end of St Giles'. It was designed by Charles Cockerell to accommodate the institution and the University Galleries (now the Ashmolean Museum) and opened in 1845. The building was extended to the north along St Giles' to designs by T.H. Hughes in 1931 and 1938.[4]
The library serves, for the greater part, those studying for the degree of Bachelor of Arts, for the various Master's degrees, and for the DPhil at Oxford University. The collections include Modern European languages, among them French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese languages (including the South American Spanish language and the Brazilian Portuguese language) with a total of around five hundred thousand volumes. The Greek and Slavonic collections consist of European languages found further eastward, including the Greek, Slavic (including Russian), Uralic, and Albanian languages.
The library holds many world-class collections.[5] Its holdings in German were started by Max Müller, who brought many publications from Germany, among them many of Martin Luther's Flugschriften, including the first edition of his Sendbrief vom Dolmetschen,[6] and go up to contemporary German literature. Italian works run from Dante and Tasso through one of the largest collections of Giovanni Battista Guarini's seminal Il Pastor fido to Foscolo and Futurist manifestos. The Spanish and Portuguese collections contain early editions of Lope de Vega, Camoens, Cervantes, Góngora, Quevedo, and Calderón. Russian first editions are well represented.[citation needed] The library's greatest strength, however, lies in its French holdings.[citation needed] Its collection of French Enlightenment authors stars the only complete collection in the world of all the French editions of Voltaire's Candide printed in 1759, the year of first publication.[7] The Taylorian also owns one of the only two known copies of the first edition of Benjamin Constant's Adolphe.[citation needed] The collections include a lock of Goethe's hair.[5]
