For nearly a century, the ornate library with the chandelier, fireplace, and wood-paneled walls has drawn students to its prized collection of classics, thousands of dust-covered tomes from Cicero to Twain.
The students who have long cherished the small library inside Dunster House, Harvard’s oldest dormitory, discovered a new feature there this week: two brass bars stretching across nearly every shelf, making the books impossible to peruse.
...“It seemed very peculiar that anyone at the university would want to actively prevent students from handling books,’’ said Jacob Sider Jost, a fifth-year PhD student. “There’s a very negative response to how this was done. There was no warning and . . . worse than being locked, the books are actually permanently fixed on the shelves, from which they cannot be removed.’’
Dunster officials have since apologized to concerned students and have explained that the bars were needed as a temporary way to protect the books - some of them highly valuable volumes or irreplaceable first editions signed by authors - after it appeared that several works had been stolen.
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