Thomas Jefferson’s Library…

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-20^th century.

Today, at the Library’s 225th anniversary, after 27 years of international work anchored by a million-dollar grant from Jerry and Gene Jones and carried out by some of the Library’s most accomplished experts, the fire-damaged collection is still slightly “garbled” but almost entirely complete. Two hundred or so minor volumes and pamphlets now may be lost to time, such as an Italian pamphlet on pomegranate growing that the ever-curious Jefferson had tucked away.

The Library’s staff on the project has examined its own collections, other libraries, rare book dealers and antiquarians from multiple countries to replace the burned and missing volumes with exact copies — the same edition, publisher and so on — to replicate the world view that led the author of the Declaration of Independence to pen such a world-changing set of ideas.

“The project is not so much about finding an individual book,” said Mark Dimunation, the former chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division who spearheaded the effort. “It’s the collection itself, because it really is the universe of his creative knowledge. All of the books are atoms in that larger universal structure. And they all had weight with him.”

Jefferson was fluent in several languages and he let his curiosity go where it might. He later wrote a friend, describing the books that would become the foundation of the Library of Congress.

“While residing in Paris I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hands, and putting by every thing which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare & valuable in every science,” he wrote. “besides (sic) this, I had standing orders, during the whole time I was in Europe, in it’s (sic) principal book-marts, particularly Amsterdam, Frankfort, Madrid and London, for such works relating to America as could be found in Paris.”

So while his was an American collection, it was composed mostly of European parts, brought together from many places at many different times, purchased by many different people.

There were some glorious copies Jefferson owned – he had more than 40 volumes by Marcus Tullius Cicero, his favorite classical philosopher; his annotated copies of The Federalist; George Sale’s translation of the Koran, as he was always exploring religion; and of course he had Blackstone’s “Commentaries on the Laws of England” – but he often preferred workaday reading copies of later editions, to save costs (he was always in debt) and to have access to the latest information.

Since these later editions were never very remarkable, few antiquarians ever saw the need to hold onto them, and most are just gone.

“One aspect of Jefferson’s collecting was to pick up things that weren’t common – things mistakenly described as ‘pamphlets’ that were really just tearaway chapters from books,” Diminution says. “There’s just a whole variety of scarce materials that can’t be located in matching copies today. And there are few titles that we can find no bibliographic evidence of whatsoever.”

But a few times a year, a matching book is discovered. In 2024, donor Marianne Spain came across the sixth edition of “Elémens de l’histoire de France, depuis Clovis jusqu’à Louis XV” by abbé Claude François Xavier Millot. It’s a three-volume set, published in Paris in 1787. She recognized it as a Jefferson match and donated it to the Library. It’s now in the Jefferson Library exhibit – just another small moment of serendipity and philanthropy bringing Jefferson’s completed library one step closer to reality.

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