The lack of ritual enthusiasms in 1927 may have had something to do with the winter chill — it was January — and the political climate. The populist governor, Roland Hartley, had recently sacked Henry Suzzallo, the erudite UW president who built the library. After failing to lever the Legislature to cut off funds for the school — in part as a scold for building what the governor called "Suzzallo's Extravagance" — Hartley stacked the Board of Regents with his cronies, who promptly fired Suzzallo. The governor would get his comeuppance in 1933 when a new Board of Regents, appointed after state voters sent Hartley home to Everett, named the dazzling Tudor Gothic structure for the then-recently-deceased Henry Suzzallo.

The original snapshot for this historical scene has 1925 written on the back of it. Here the library is still a shell. Part of the main floor was opened in October 1926, the month that Suzzallo was expelled. By then perhaps some of the books had been moved from the old library, seen here directly to the left of the soaring landmark. At the time there were 175,000 books to cart the short distance between them. Today, counting volumes, serials and microforms, the University Library can claim about 13 million titles.