Anthem Library of the Month | UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS

I attach the undergraduate entrance to the library of the University of Illinois, the largest University library in the USA, and home to the H. G. Wells papers, one of the world’s largest literary archives. I was at Illinois in 2009, working on my book Maps of Utopia, recently published by OUP. To the right of the picture you can see the USA’s oldest experimental cornfield; when the undergraduate library was built, it was built underground so the field wouldn’t be overshadowed.

—Dr. Simon J. James, author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative in the Novels of George Gissing