Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents (Hyperion Paperback-April 15, 2014)
It is National Library Week -a time to celebrate the value and fundamental importance of the public library to American democracy.
No better place to do that than with America’s library–the Library of Congress.
So here’s the answer– the man who said,
I cannot live without books.
Thomas Jefferson in a letter to John Adams, 1815
Thomas Jefferson, third president (Source: White House)
Established with $5,000 appropriated by the legislation, the original library was housed in the new Capitol until August 1814, when invading British troops set fire to the Capitol Building, burning and pillaging the contents of the small library.
Within a month, retired President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating books, “putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science”; his library was considered to be one of the finest in the United States. In offering his collection to Congress, Jefferson anticipated controversy over the nature of his collection, which included books in foreign languages and volumes of philosophy, science, literature, and other topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library. He wrote, “I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”
In January 1815, Congress accepted Jefferson’s offer, appropriating $23,950 for his 6,487 books, and the foundation was laid for a great national library. The Jeffersonian concept of universality, the belief that all subjects are important to the library of the American legislature, is the philosophy and rationale behind the comprehensive collecting policies of today’s Library of Congress.
Read More on Jefferson;s Library here
The story of the sale of the Jefferson library is also told at Monticello
