It is the most important work of the ones which were built in the reformist period of the Enlightenment, when Vicente Blasco was the principal. For its construction (1789-1795), on a Neoclassical project made by architect Joaquín Martínez, new lands were purchased at the corner of the block between the Universidad Street and La Nave Street.

The cruel bombing of Valencia in the first days of January 1812, during the siege of the city by Napoleon’s troops, caused a huge fire that ruined much of the university building and destroyed the new Library. Between 1830 and 1837 it was rebuilt and reconfigured according to the original project. It was equipped with lacquered wooden shelves for books, paid for by the librarian Mariano Liñán, who accepted the books donated by various professors and scholars and collections from the libraries in the convents and monasteries suppressed by ecclesiastical confiscation of 1835.

The architectural planning devised for the Library later served as a model for the reconstruction of the entire building of the University, following the project proposed by the prestigious architect Timoteo Calvo Ibarra in 1839, and for the formal unification of the whole block, which culminated in 1954.
 

Currently, after moving the General Library into the new building of Tarongers Campus, it has been converted into Historic Library, which houses publications up to the late nineteenth century.

It holds valuable manuscripts, incunabula, printed works from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, engravings, stamps, posters, and beautiful high-quality samples Valencian graphic arts in the first third of the twentieth century. The collection is completed with posters of the Spanish Civil War period (1936-1939), an important Map Library composed of very valuable Portolan charts, maps and atlases with cartographic spheres (round books), along with numismatic collections and collections of intaglios and cameos that make up a cultural treasure for researchers and interested visitors.