Liberty Fund building $22M headquarters in Carmel

Few know about and even fewer have seen Liberty Fund's 50,000-book collection, most of which is shelved in a modest office building surrounded by trees and a stone fountain on Indianapolis' Northeastside.

Amassed over 50 years, the unusual collection includes original documents from America's founding and rare editions of works by Adam Smith, author of that laissez-faire classic "The Wealth of Nations."

The obscure printed trove is now set for a coming-out party. And some walk-in traffic.

Liberty Fund is building a $22 million headquarters for itself in Carmel, and the centerpiece will be a distinctive-looking wing for its specialized library.

The new offices for the educational foundation will represent, in brick and mortar, the intellectual underpinnings for its new commercial surroundings: the high-rent offices, hotels, corporate headquarters and other unabashed displays of free enterprise along U.S. 31 in Carmel.

Liberty Fund CEO Chris Talley, a former banker, said the foundation's board picked the 8.5-acre site in part for its prominence.

"We do hope it sparks curiosity about us — about our educational purpose," Talley said.

Books are to the Liberty Fund what oil paintings are to the Louvre, so making the library the centerpiece of its new home made sense.

When the move happens in December 2016, the library will occupy a glass-clad, two-story rectangle facing busy Meridian Street at 111th. Overlaying the glass will be a steel mesh decorated with a kind of historical frieze that highlights the evolution of liberty, from its first written appearance in ancient Greece to its 18th century culmination in the Declaration of Independence.

Liberty Fund founder Pierre Goodrich, an eccentric and successful businessman who died in 1973, created the timeline for the walls of a seminar room he donated at Wabash College. The fund and its local architect, Rowland Design, decided to take the timeline outdoors and spread it over three sides of the library wing.

The fund's 11-member board, Talley said, sees the new building as a permanent home customized for its lofty mission to foster thinking about the political, social and other dimensions of liberty.

The  63,000-square-foot building also will hold offices, a cafeteria and conference space surrounding an inner courtyard. The grounds will hold walking paths.

With the library, there were sticky legal obstacles to overcome. The fund's library has long been closed to the public, even to scholars. Liberty Fund's tax status forbids grants, and letting outsiders use its library is considered a form of grant-giving.

So, for the most part, the only permitted users of the library have been the fund's 50 employees.

It took some brainstorming by Liberty Fund's lawyers to come up with the idea of a new nonprofit entity that will have the right to let outsiders use the new library if they sign research contracts, Talley said.  (Talley hardly expects new users to overwhelm the checkout desk. Visitors probably will number only about 10 a year, he said.)

Although the library is its most notable asset, Liberty Fund devotes the bulk of its $20 million annual budget to other things.

It hosts about 200 conferences a year to promote deliberations on liberty. Goodrich thought enlightened, Socratic conversation was the best way to learn. Holding the seminars is not cheap, given that the fund pays participants, mostly academics, to attend. That means picking up the tab for millions of dollars worth of plane fares, hotel charges and meals.

The fund also publishes about 10 books a year. The titles are hardly contenders for The New York Times best-seller list. Recent published works include a reprint of Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, which first appeared in 1755, and a collection of essays by the late Austrian free-trade economist Ludwig von Mises, one of the fund's all-time best-selling authors.

Videos, e-books, audio recordings, online blogs and even Facebook and Twitter postings also are part of the fund's modern-day outreach.

Everything bears the fund's logo, a delicately drawn cuneiform rendering of liberty done by a Sumerian clay tablet inscriber in 2300 B.C. Goodrich came across a mention of the inscription in an obscure 1956 book.

Talley said he has considered whether the penny-pinching Goodrich, who donated his fortune to the fund, would support spending $22 million to give Liberty Fund a prominent home of its own. Liberty Fund's founder, who was the son of one-term Indiana Gov. James Goodrich, was so frugal that he would reverse his frayed shirt collars for longer wear, according to biographer Dane Starbuck, a Carmel lawyer and Liberty Fund board member.

But Pierre Goodrich also was one of the richest men in Indiana and not averse to thinking big. He owned a Stradivarius violin, and he oversaw numerous business ventures, including coal mines, a granary, a telephone company and a securities firm.

Talley got to know Goodrich from working at a Winchester bank he owned and said he has concluded that Goodrich "would find not much fault" with the new building.

Talley said he's also certain Goodrich would like the idea of opening the fund's library to visitors. Goodrich was such a book lover that in the lobby of his Winchester bank he created a public library.

Call Star reporter Jeff Swiatek at (317) 444-6483. Follow him on Twitter: @JeffSwiatek.

Liberty Fund

Mission: Nonprofit operating foundation that promotes a deeper understanding of liberty around the world.

Offices: 8335 Allison Pointe Trail.

New offices: 111th and Meridian streets in Carmel, opening December 2016.

Activities: Holds about 200 seminars and publishes about 10 books a year. Owns a 50,000-volume library used by its researchers.

Founded: 1960 in Indianapolis.

Founder: Pierre Goodrich, Indiana businessman who left most of his estate to the fund when he died in 1973.

Endowment value: About $315 million.

Employees: 50.

CEO: Chris Talley.