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Thomas Jefferson’s Library…February 24, 2025
Posted by: Neely Tucker
In September 1814, Thomas Jefferson wrote one of the more important letters in American history to his friend Samuel H. Smith, a longtime friend and prominent academic and newspaper publisher. Jefferson, furious that British troops had burned the U.S. Capitol a few weeks earlier, asked Smith to act as an intermediary and offer his immense book collection to Congress to replace the in-house library that had been torched.
Smith did so and Jefferson sold Congress 4,931 titles (encompassing 6,487 volumes) for $23,950 the next year, forming the DNA of today’s Library of Congress, now the largest library in the world.
Jefferson’s books were seen as working copies at the time, quickly added to and moved about and soon, tracking where his actual books were become difficult to assess. Then, after an 1851 Christmas Eve fire in the Congressional Reading Room destroyed 3,000 or so of Jefferson’s original volumes, all hope of preserving or recreating his original library seemed lost.
Ever since, reconstructing Jefferson’s “catalogue at this moment” has been a quest, a fascination and an obsession for scholars. Jefferson had written out his own bibliographies of his collections, as have later experts such, as E. Millicent Sowerby’s magnificent one compiled in the mid-20th century.See Also: https://tjlibraries.monticello.org/tjandreading/relatedlinks.html
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