Michael Parry Mazur Library Menu

Michael Parry Mazur Library

The Heartland Institute is proud to make available to the public the Michael Parry Mazur Memorial Library, one of the nation’s best libraries on freedom and limited government with nearly 20,000 books. The library is located at The Heartland Institute at 3939 North Wilke Road in Arlington Heights, Illinois. You can browse everything in the library via this online database. We also have a book wish list at Amazon; check out our list and then check your collection for books you may be willing to donate! See the book donation guidelines below.

The Michael Parry Mazur Library holds nearly 20,000 books on American history, economics, education, environment issues, health care policy, law, libertarianism, philosophy, and other topics. The collection will be of special interest to students and scholars studying economics and political science, elected officials and members of their staffs, and concerned citizens.

The library contains books and journals unlikely to be found in public or even university libraries. Featured authors include William F. Buckley, Whittaker Chambers, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises, and Richard Weaver.

Watch the Grand Opening presentations below, and read a re-cap here.

In September 2016, the Michael Parry Mazur Library was accepted for membership in RAILS — Reaching Across Illinois Library System. RAILS serves approximately 1,300 academic, public, school, and special library agencies in northern and west-central Illinois.

Subjects in the Collection

The collection offers books in the following topic areas:

Biography
Economics
Education
Environment
Fiction
History
Health Care
Investing
Law
Literature & Literary Criticism
Libertarianism
Management
Math & Science
Philosophy
Political Science/Public Policy
Psychology & Sociology
Public Policy – Budget & Taxes
Public Policy – Entitlements
Public Policy – Foreign Policy
Public Policy – Labor Unions
Public Policy – Privatization
Public Policy – Technology
Religion
Socialism & Soviet Studies
Reference

Public Access

A constantly updated catalogue of the collection is available online at this online, searchable database. The library is open to the public from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. There is no admission fee, but visitors are asked to call 312/377-4000 to make an appointment.

The library is not, at this time, a lending library. Patrons can use study space, wi-fi, copiers, and printers while visiting the library. Duplicate copies of some books in the collection are available for sale.

About Michael Parry Mazur

Michael Parry Mazur graduated from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he earned a Ph.D. in economics. He was a staff economist at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in Washington, DC serving under Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Dr. Mazur passed away in 1987. For a more complete bio, click here.

Please Donate to the Library

If you share our goal of preserving the literature of liberty for future generations of students and scholars, please consider making a contribution to The Heartland Institute earmarked for the library. Your gift will be used to buy bookcases, cover shipping expenses, pay for staff, and offset the cost of building maintenance and operations.

The Heartland Institute is a national nonprofit research and education organization. Contributions, including gifts earmarked for the library, are tax deductible under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Click here for more information about how to donate.

Donate Your Books to The Heartland Institute

In this digital era it is easy to imagine that all the information a researcher might need is available online. This is not true.

Google and Wikipedia searches increasingly produce only “politically correct” results. Even efforts such as The Online Library of Liberty and Library of Economics and Liberty do not contain many of the books of interest and value to researchers interested in such public policy issues as environmental protection or health care reform. Searching the websites of the many conservative and libertarian think tanks for their own past publications can be tedious and surprisingly unproductive.

Heartland’s beautiful building in suburban Chicago has room for about 20,000 books in the formal library and in hallways throughout the building. We have just about reached that number, and so are having to make hard choices about whether to accept more books, sell the books we have to make more room, or even expand our building upward by adding a floor. For the time being, we continue to accept book donations. If you can help us accommodate an ever-growing library, we hope you will share your ideas with Joe Davis, our librarian, or consider making a financial contribution earmarked for the library.

The retail price of books donated to The Heartland Institute is tax-deductible. The donor’s name can be stamped on title pages of donated books. Books also can be given with the understanding that they will be loaned, given away, auctioned, or sold for less than their retail prices to students and scholars.

Guidelines for Donating Books

Ship your books to 3939 North Wilke Road, Arlington Heights, IL 60004.

Will Heartland pay for shipping?

Please go to our online book catalogue to see what books we already have, and read the paragraph below about “Books we probably don’t want.” If you have books we may want and don’t already have, please send them to us and we will reimburse you for the cost of shipping. Depending on how many books you have, you might want to use a moving service rather than box up heavy books yourself and carry them to a Fed Ex or UPS office. Movers will box and move your entire library. Heartland could pay for that. Call Joe Davis, our librarian, at 312/377-4000 or reach him at [email protected] if you need advice or assistance.

How many books does Heartland want?

In four short years, the library has already grown to more than 20,000 books, which is the capacity of our library space. However, we can make more room by removing and selling or giving away “dupes,” and are already doing so. (See “What about duplicates?” below.) So call us first if you are giving away thousands of books. We are confident we can accommodate smaller numbers of books we want.

Will the books actually be used?

Yes! Heartland’s new office is within 30 minutes of 20 college campuses. We expect to have as many as 20 interns a year and to host dozens of events and discussion groups and seminars. We hope to have visiting scholars spending a week or two working side-by-side with colleagues and Heartland staff while staying at a Marriott Courtyard Hotel only a ten-minute walk from the new office.

Do I need a list of books I am donating?

No, unless you want to produce one. Heartland staff can open the boxes you send us and produce a list of titles and list prices, which you can then use to support an in-kind donation claim on your income taxes (if that’s valuable to you). Heartland staff uses a barcode reader, which is much faster than doing it by hand.

Books we probably don't want:

We don’t need fiction, poetry, religion, foreign languages, old reference books (like dictionaries or encyclopedias), computer manuals, or cookbooks. We especially want books on American history, economics, education (K-12 and higher ed), environmentalism, history of social thought (Plato, Hobbes, Mill, etc.), philosophy, politics, public policy, sociology, Soviet studies, and world history.

What about old academic journals?

The short answer is yes, please send them. They can be bulky and some are available online, but some aren’t, many aren’t free, and we’re often struck by how good articles simply don’t come up in a Google or Google Scholar search but can be found paging through old issues of such journals. Please do not send old issues of popular magazines or movement journals, such as American Spectator or Reason, as we already have those. Displaying journals on shelves can be difficult without magazine boxes, so if your journals are currently in magazine boxes, please keep them in those boxes and ship them to us that way.

What about duplicates?

We fully expect to get lots of “dupes.” We plan to stock two or three copies of a given book and then sell (for $3 each on Amazon.com and our online store and $1 each to visitors to our headquarters in Arlington Heights, Illinois) or give away the rest. If you have two, three, or four copies of The Road to Serfdom or The Wealth of Nations – or a book about the book – and don’t have a good home for them, send them all to us! We’ll offer them to college students, interns, visiting scholars, and others who visit Heartland.

What about first editions and other collectibles?

First editions, signed copies, and otherwise rare and valuable books should be separated from the rest of your collection and put in a separate box and plainly labeled. We will put such books on display in a more secure place in the library – and perhaps give them to speakers or other special guests, or sell them at auctions or online to raise funds to support our mission.

What if I've marked up my book?

Many of us who love books write in the margins or take a highlighter pen to mark up key passages. That is a good thing! You’re sharing with future readers of your books what you thought was worth emphasizing or worthy of comment – and that adds to their reader’s experience. So if you have a “marked up” book about free markets and liberty, it will have a good home in Heartland’s library.

What about furniture?

Some donors have offered to donate bookcases, tables, and chairs. Used office furniture is very inexpensive and probably looks and performs better than most furniture you might donate, so generally speaking we do not want your old furniture. But we are open to suggestions. There is a thrift store just a few blocks from our new building, and its staff will send a truck over and take whatever we don’t want.

In conclusion …

If you have books or a whole library you need to part with as you “downsize” or experience some other change in life, please consider donating them to The Heartland Institute. We will pay to have them packed up and delivered to our new home. We will produce a list you can use to claim an in-kind donation on your tax return. We will make sure the books are properly handled and used by scholars and the next generation of freedom fighters.

Questions?

To make an appointment with our librarian, policy experts, or other Heartland staff, please contact Heartland’s librarian, Joe Davis, at [email protected] or 312/377-4000.