When Brenda Zuniga first stepped into UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, she drew a deep breath and instantly fell in love with the repository's oak paneling, rich tapestries and leather-bound volumes.

"I felt so privileged being able to work in these beautiful rooms surrounded by first editions," gushed the UCLA senior majoring in fine arts and English. "There's so much detail - with the paintings and the paneling - it just feels authentic."

For decades, the stunning 1926 rare book library that specializes in English literature and 17th- and 18th-century history has had that same breathtaking effect on those who work and visit there. Next month, this marble-clad architectural jewel, one of UCLA's most unique structures, will mark an important anniversary.

Just 75 years ago, copper fortune scion William Andrews Clark Jr. donated the exquisite library in 1926 to UCLA along with a $1.5 million endowment. He had spent two years erecting the Italian Baroque edifice on a large lot in West Adams, 13 miles east of the campus.

"For some time it has been my intention to make a conditional gift of the library building, the books, manuscripts and equipment contained therein, the real property ... so that the ... library building and its contents (may be) used by students for research work," Clark wrote in a June 4, 1926 letter to the Board of Regents.

His only condition: that the university never sell or circulate any of his 13,000-volume collection.

When Clark died eight years later, he was eulogized by civic leaders primarily for being the founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, having covered the orchestra's debt for the first 15 years of its existence. But the philanthropist's name at UCLA has long been linked to other distinctions: he assembled the world's largest public collection of works by and about the 19th-century poet, dramatist and aesthete Oscar Wilde and the largest collection, outside the British Library, by the 17th-century English poet, playwright and essayist John Dryden.

Clark also provided the public with a place they can actually hold a Shakespeare folio or pore over important editions of Chaucer, Ben Jonson and Milton or books once owned by Swift, Thomas Hobbes, William Hogarth and Newton.

In September, the Clark Library will launch a yearlong celebration of its auspicious beginnings. A celebrity reading either of a well-known Oscar Wilde play or a Gilbert and Sullivan spoof on Wilde's work will kick off festivities.

"This anniversary is a very important milestone, which should call the larger community's attention to a great resource that has sometimes been overlooked by the general public," said Peter Reill, a historian and director of the Clark as well as UCLA's Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies. The center oversees the Clark.

The anniversary will be the third marked by the Clark in two years. In recognition of the 300th anniversary of Dryden's death in 1700, the library staged two conferences last fall, attracting scholars from across the country.

For Wilde, who died Nov. 30, 1900, the library tossed even more confetti. Since 1999, the library has staged six Wilde conferences - including one on the actual 100th anniversary of his death - and a poetry reading.

The library has also served as ground zero for major research projects. Its collection has formed the foundation for almost every recent biography about Wilde or the members of his circle, including "Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius" by Barbara Belford; "Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas" by Douglas Murray; and "Truly Wilde: the Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece" by Joan Schenkar. Almost half of the material featured in "Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde," the critically acclaimed collection published in December by Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, hailed from the Clark.

"Every time I go there, I find something extraordinary and new," Holland told the Los Angeles Times in 1998.

Clark-based scholarship on Dryden - England's most famous post-Shakespearean author of the 1600s - is also poised to reach a pinnacle. With imminent distribution of a recently published collection of Dryden's translations of poetry from Greek, Italian and Middle English, the California Dryden Project will draw to a close. For more than 50 years, Dryden scholars - many of them UCLA professors - have poked and prodded hundreds of Dryden editions in the Clark to assemble the first definitive collection of his writings in more than a century. Scholars' efforts will fill 20 volumes and more than 10,000 pages.

"Almost never did we have to go outside the Clark," said Vinton A. Dearing, a UCLA professor emeritus of English and the project's editor in chief.

No wonder, then, that a panel of independent reviewers recently gave high marks to UCLA's Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies.

"The Clark/Center has become the most important and dynamic institutional center for research in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the country, and it is poised to assume the same position of leadership in relation to the rest of the world," six scholars concluded last year after a regular review for the UC Regents.

That reputation has won the center the honor of hosting the next quadrennial meeting of the International Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, set for 2003. The society has met only one other time in the United States; it has been more than a quarter century since Yale rolled out that red carpet.

"Scholars are attracted to the center because of the excellence of the library," said Reill. "That's the secret of our success."

But the library attracts more than career scholars. Among those drawn to a conference on the anniversary of Wilde's death were a retired schoolteacher, an LAPD detective and a massage therapist, all devotees of the author. At the Clark's annual fundraiser - An Afternoon of Acquisitions - budding book collectors rubbed elbows with the city's premier book dealers, and men with tattoos running up their arms chatted up women wearing pearls. Part of the library's far-ranging appeal can be attributed to Wilde, a celebrated wit persecuted for his homosexuality.

"It's easy to identify with Wilde today, but few people saw his value when Clark started collecting his work," Reill said. "Clark had the prescience to see Wilde's brilliance when he was being demeaned."

But Clark doesn't get all the credit. Since Reill took the helm of the organization a decade ago, he has made an effort to reach out to the Clark's mid-city neighborhood, primarily with concerts of 17th- and 18th-century music. Although "Chamber Music at The Clark" now ranks as one of the city's premiere chamber music series, tickets have been kept at an affordable $15 - less than a quarter of the cost of admission to comparable series. The series, underwritten by the Ahmanson Foundation, the Edmund D. Edelman Foundation and other benefactors, has become so popular that the library has instituted a lottery system to award tickets.

"We could fill each seat at the concerts three times over," said Bruce Whiteman, the Clark's head librarian.

Beginning this summer, the library will start building inroads to area public schools. The Clark will host a two-day conference for Los Angeles Unified School teachers in the humanities, the first of what the library staff hopes will become a series of cultural enhancement programs benefiting local high school students.

Also under Reill, the library has increased its attempt to reach out to the beneficiaries as originally envisioned by Clark: UCLA students. With a $10,000 annual gift from the Ahmanson Foundation, the Clark four years ago started hosting an annual research seminar for a select group of undergraduates.

"It gives them an experience conducting advanced research in the humanities, using not just books but unpublished material," said Joe Bristow, a UCLA English professor who specializes in 19th-century English writing.

Zuniga, one of 10 undergraduates who took this year's seminar, stumbled upon an interesting tidbit while working on an assignment: a reference to Wilde serving as editor of "Little Folks," a well-known children's magazine of his day.

"None of the librarians had heard of it," Zuniga said.

Even though Zuniga wrapped up her course two months ago, she is still pursing the lead, aided by Bristow, and they have yet to find any scholar who is aware of Wilde's role at the magazine.

"It's rather unusual for a student to unearth a piece of information overlooked by other scholars who have examined the subject in depth," Bristow said. "This kind of experience excites students about the possibilities of scholarship."