Gifts & Memorials

Bridwell Library’s greatness has been achieved through the support of its many benefactors, in particular through the gifts and endowments that sustain our work. Such philanthropy also lies at the heart of the Library’s promising future.

The Library accepts appropriate donations of books and collections from individuals. We are also pleased to receive funds to acquire a book in honor of friends and loved ones. A special bookplate can be affixed in gift books as a reminder of the donor and honoree. We are dependent on donors to underwrite the exhibitions, publications, and programs of the Library.

Another way to make a permanent and lasting gift is to establish an endowment that offers ongoing support of acquisitions in a particular area. If you are interested in making a gift of any kind, please use our Gifting Form, Secure Online Giving, or call 214-768-3483.

The task of bringing together a first-class library is no simple one. Time is our greatest enemy. How dare we think we can build such a library at this late date?
 
Yet we do dare. And we propose to succeed.
 
We propose to break the barrier imposed by our youth. We have to. At the very same time that Colonel John Glenn was circling the globe, I was on the phone making arrangements for acquiring a major incunabula collection for Bridwell Library. What could be more odd? Trying to get a fifteenth-century collection at the same moment that the twentieth century was preening itself in its most dramatic show!
 
But that event gave me all the more reason for moving heaven and earth to get a solid fifteenth-century foundation for the library. We are far from through.
 
A first-class library is the frontier of the mind -- not just a new frontier -- but it is the eternal frontier. Let us match men and ideas. Let us prepare them . . .
 
That is why we are interested in a first-class library. This is why we are interested in Bridwell Library.

JOSEPH STERLING BRIDWELL
speaking at the dedication of the Bridwell-DeBellis Fifteenth-Century Book Collection, September, 1962