After British troops burned Congress's library, Jefferson sold it his own books
In August 1814 British forces burned the Capitol and more than 3,000 volumes of the young Library of Congress. Within a month Thomas Jefferson offered his personal collection as a replacement. Congress paid $23,950 for 6,487 books, over objections that some were irreligious, and the library's scope was never narrow again.
James Madison proposed a congressional library in 1783 without success, so Congress borrowed from city libraries in Philadelphia and New York. On 24 April 1800 John Adams signed an act providing $5,000 for books and a room to hold them. The first order from London yielded 740 books and three maps, kept in the new Capitol. One account book from 1810 survived the 1814 fire because Admiral George Cockburn took it as a souvenir; his family returned it in 1940.
Jefferson's library, gathered over five decades, ranged far beyond law and politics. He argued that no subject existed that a member of Congress might not someday need to consult. Daniel Webster, among others, wanted to leave out atheistic or immoral titles, but the whole collection went through, doubling the library. Jefferson sorted books along Francis Bacon's divisions of Memory, Reason and Imagination, with 44 subcategories, a scheme used until Herbert Putnam's Library of Congress Classification replaced it late in the 19th century.
A second blaze on Christmas Eve 1851 was worse, destroying 35,000 books, two-thirds of the collection and two-thirds of Jefferson's transfer. Congress spent $168,700 to replace losses, and by 2008 librarians had tracked down substitutes for all but 300 of Jefferson's documented titles. A cautious era followed until Ainsworth Rand Spofford, librarian from 1865 to 1897, pushed it toward national status. From 1870 it received two copies of every copyrighted American work, and it absorbed 40,000 non-scientific volumes from the fire-damaged Smithsonian.
In 1897 the library left the Capitol for the new, fireproof building now named for Jefferson, carrying more than 840,000 volumes, 40% obtained through copyright deposit. It has since added the Adams and Madison buildings and runs the Copyright Office and the Congressional Research Service. Its holdings now reach roughly 173 million items in more than 470 languages, though only Congress members, their staff and library employees may take materials out.
Source: Library of Congress
