Business School Library Is First to Permit Smoking--Breaks Ancient Tradition Dating Back to Sir Walter Raleigh's Time

Visitors to the reading room of the new Harvard Business School Library when it is opened must not be surprised to have to find their way through barrages of aromatic tobacco smoke. If no obstacle is encountered the librarians will work on the basis that the proverbial tired business man is not at all a nonenity, but an actuality in the business plant across the Charles and needs nothing so much as a restful pipe of tobacco to sooth his nerves as he labors over ponderous volumes.

Having provided the future business man of the country with a modern Utopia over the river with all conveniences, not forgetting cheerful dining establishments with buff and rose wall patterns and lacquered panelings, it is contemplated that the finishing touch would be supplied if the graduate business man could meditate over his favorite pipe of tobacco, whether it be Prince Albert, Edgeworth or the latest Union brand. Indeed, someone in authority has stated that if he had his way every man would be compelled to smoke, that he likes to see a man smoke a pipe....

College men who have been taught that the greatest sacrifice one can commit in the sacred precincts of Widener is to light a match or steal a book must recognize in the probable innovation of the Business School Library a sign of the times. It will be the first time smoking has ever been permitted in any college library.

Objections to the radical step go back to the times of Sir Walter Raleigh and his introduction of smoking into England. It was never permitted in libraries, some of them to this day in England barring electric lights, confining research work to the hours of daylight.