[Forged in fire: the Thomas Jefferson collection at the Library of Congress 2008] [Elizabeth Fee:] The Library and I'd like to welcome you to the HMD Seminar series. We recently decided to expand the series beyond strictly History of Medicine and to include some of the leading lights in the worlds of rare books and Special collections. And so I'm delighted today to have the chance to introduce to Mark Dimunation, who is chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library of Congress. As Chief, he is responsible for the development and management of the Rare Book Collection, the largest collection of rare books in North America. Mark came to the Library of Congress from Cornell University, where he served as Curator of Rare Books, Associate Director for Collections in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and taught in the English Department. He earlier attended the graduate program in American history at the University of California, Berkeley. Mark Dimunation has lectured extensively about book collections and has authored a number of exhibition catalogs, including a recent study of Andrew Dixon White as the 19th century book collector. He is on the faculty of the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, where he teaches the history of the book. He is currently completing an extensive project to reconstruct the Thomas Jefferson Library at the Library of Congress, which will be the subject of his talk today. Let me just also mention that the next History of Medicine seminar is going to be held next week, Tuesday, February the 5th, from 2:00 to 3:00 here in the Lister Hill Auditorium. And this will be in celebration of African American History Month. Samuel Roberts of Columbia University will speak on the topic New histories for new Politics, Making African American Health history matter. So you are all invited to that lecture. And now we have forged in fire, reconstructing Thomas Jefferson's library. Mark Dimunation. [ Applause ] [Mark Dimunation:] We were playing with the mics earlier. Can you hear me? See, that's one of those questions you ask when you talk. And then you realize that that's absolutely the wrong way to ask the question because the people who can't hear you can't tell you that they can't hear you. Okay, I'll assume that you can all hear me. I'm very pleased to be here. Thank you very much that I colleagues in HMD to offer the invitation. I'm rather pleased to be here. We had a lovely morning doing shop talk, and while walking through collections and doing what rare book types like to do a lot which is talk about books and look at books but also finding the the points of similarity. What we discover of course is that we're all about the same business. Our responsibility of special collections, librarians in particular, whether we're documenting the history of a subject like the history of medicine or whether we have a larger more universal style collection, is to gather and preserve and interpret a physical culture and to keep those stories alive for the generations of researchers that come. It's a responsibility that I take very seriously. It's my passion. I believe that whether they're fundamentally grand or mundane, these materials represent the story of the past, and our ability to understand past is limited unless we maintain a physical presence to work with. It's what my predecessor Frederick [?Argoth?], called our destiny. To keep the world of the past alive and keep the expectations and the hopes of the future intact. I live and work in the world's largest library, which also happens to be the nation's oldest extant federal cultural institution. That phrase is sort of like what we used to say. Gutenberg's Bible was the first book printed, and now we say it's the first book printed in Western Europe with movable metal type. We used to just say we were the oldest federal cultural for oldest federal cultural institution, and then we sort of was our oldest cultural institution in America, that it was the oldest extant cultural institution of America. Now we've become the oldest extant federal cultural institution in America, as concerned citizens have come forward to correct us. At any rate, as you can well imagine, this is a vast and complicated landscape in which I exist. Our collections now number somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 million pieces-- in all imaginable formats. We're currently are cataloging in 450 different languages. So you can see that the universe of the National Library is a rather extraordinary one. Its story-- begins with Thomas Jefferson. Washington was scorched, the blazing of houses, ships and stores, the report of exploding magazines. The crash of falling roofs informed them of what was going forward. You can conceive of nothing finer than the site which met them as they drew near the town. This is how George Gleig, a member of the English troop of the War of 1812, recalled his experience as he invaded Washington City. "The sky was brilliantly illuminated by the different conflagrations, and a dark red light was thrown upon the road, sufficient to permit each man to view distinctly his comrades face heaps of smoking ruins." On an unbearably hot and muggy day, August 24th 1814, an exhausted advance guard of an English army marched to Capitol Hill. They had arrived by ship some 50 miles away, along with 4000 other troops, including Mr. Greek, only days before, but now found themselves in the somewhat abandoned city of Washington. That's because all the male residents had fled. They fled to Georgetown. For those of us who live in Washington, we understand the notion of all the men fleeing to Georgetown. This is a Capitol Hill phenomenon. When everyone goes home at night, they all go to Georgetown. Meeting only limited resistance. The troops set about their appointed task, which was to destroy every single public building in the city of Washington. This was part of a retaliation, a payback for what had happened the year previously in 1813, when the American forces destroyed every public building in York, which is now Toronto, including the Houses of Parliament. By the day's end, the House and the Senate building of the Capitol were smoldering shells. The White House was burned, as was the Treasury and numerous other public buildings. The English Admiral Cockburn, who was often jeeringly referred to as the ruffian by the DC newspaper The National Intelligencer, capped the devastation by dismantling the newspaper's office brick by brick. And this is why I like the man. In addition, he ordered that the entire type font be removed and every letter C be burnt, melted, so that the newspaper could never again print his name. [ Laughter ] Amidst the smoke and the rubble, the remnants of the Congressional Library smoldered and then disappeared. The nucleus of the Library of Congress, therefore, was forged in fire. In 1815, Congress purchased Thomas Jefferson's personal library, what was then the largest private book collection available in North America, to replace the 3000 volume Congressional Library that had been destroyed when the British burned the capital. Although he faced financial difficulties at the time, Jefferson generously offered his entire collection for whatever price found appropriate by Congress, with the intention to replace the devastations of British vandalism and enhance congressional resources. Well, as you would well expected with any gesture to Congress, it was immediately met with rank partisan debate. One Federalist opponent, Cyrus King of Massachusetts. At this point, he's representing everything from Maine down to Massachusetts-- claim that the library was symbolic of Mr. Jefferson's infidel philosophy. Mr. Jefferson's library, he warned, contain the good, the bad, the indifferent, the old, the new, the worthless, in languages which many cannot read and most of us ought not. [ Laughter ] It's surprising how some of this language reads very contemporary in our experience currently on the Hill. Others objected to the expense given it's given the circumstances of the time, any amount spent on the library could muster 210 men in the regular army. In anticipation of this rancorous debate, Jefferson defended his broad collecting interests in an 1814 letter countering that there was in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer. Those of you who actually do research in the Library of Congress, you'll see this all over the place, but many of us also wear it around our necks as part of our ID's. The Congressional decision took months and in the end the members acquiesced in January of 1815, voted to purchase the 6487 volumes for nearly $24,000, very cheap. This sum was determined by a Georgetown book dealer by the name of Joseph Mulligan, who basically just prize the collection by size, a dollar for 12 mos, $3 for an octavo, $6 for an a quarto $10 for a portfolio. With that decision, the National Library was restored. Jefferson received word of the approval while out at Monticello, where he happened to be entertaining two young gentlemen from Boston, George Ticknor and Francis Gray, young scholars who with introductions from John Adams. We're paying a visit to the former president and his library, and they had the great fortune to witness the moment. Both of course, we're doing what many had done before, which was to seek out the intellectual counsel and reading advice from the great mind of the American Enlightenment in the midst of his great library. By 1815, Jefferson's library was itself a destination. The sheer size of over 6000 volumes was a sight to behold. Mr. Ticknor, who was a Dartmouth graduate, was soon after retained by Jefferson to acquire books when he traveled through Europe. Mr. Gray, who went on to become a very famous and influential connoisseur of prints, thought that the library was rather comprehensive and in classical authors. He was also the recipient of a now very famous and important letter from Jefferson, where Jefferson tries to define the race formula and argues that slavery has nothing to do with race. This is his claim to fame now in modern history. But at the time he did an assessment of Jefferson's library, claiming that although Mr. Jefferson was very careless about his additions, his holdings of Americana were without question the greatest in the world. It's true that in his lifetime Thomas Jefferson accumulated not one but three libraries. His first private library burned with Shadwell, a home in 1770. Very few books escape the flames. Actually, fire seems to follow Thomas Jeffery-- fire and debt seem to follow Thomas Jefferson around his books in spite of the disruptions of the pending revolution and the obvious cost of rebuilding his Shadwell collection. The 26 year old lawyer set out to build an even more extensive collection to replace the one he lost in 1770. One that would, as he would say, modestly encompass the whole of recorded knowledge. Jefferson's intentions were ambitious and he indicated at the time and intense desire to build a practical collection that chronicled human endeavor. Acquiring large numbers of books in 18th century colonial America was a task, a difficult one. It was actually an issue in terms of the undertaking. The availability of stock was small, the expense was great, especially for someone of of Jefferson's young means at the time, even though he had money. We do know, however, that Jefferson began to acquire books in earnest, though modestly, once he started at William and Mary in 1760. Long before this Shadwell fire. Off and on for the next seven years, through coursework in the law school, Jefferson obtained books from the office of the Virginia Gazette in Williamsburg. This was the place in which you would buy books in this period of time because of paper tax, because of the availability of printing, oftentimes your materials we purchased at newspaper offices. In 1765, for example, he acquired over 32 titles that would characterize his lifetime collection. Law, History, Italian, Dictionaries, Poetry, Classical Literature, Agriculture, Surgery, and, as we recently witnessed, at least in Washington, DC, a copy of the Quran [Qur'an]. By 1773, Jefferson had already amassed the library of more than 12 thousand 1250 titles. The books came from many sources. He bought up Planters, book collections. He bought up book collections from faculty at William and Mary. He even bought up the books that had been abandoned by the fleeing royal Governor of Virginia. And of course, by the time he went to Philadelphia, had opened an entire new market for him. While he was busy at the convention writing the Declaration. 10 years later, he had doubled the size of his collection, now at 2640 volumes. When he departed for Europe, he looked greatly forward to the opportunity to actually play in the real market and developed lists and bibliographies with his cohort James Madison to prepare himself for the trip. This is when Jefferson began to organize his books into subject areas. He spent five years in Paris, fundamentally important to his collection and as a result, fundamentally important to my life today. To Jefferson, the French were more advanced in science in his mind and in philosophical discussions than, say, the English. His own academic training had pushed him in this direction, and it was only further influenced by the availability of books in Paris at the time. He arrived with a list and began to buy. Whenever he had a free moment, he was out in the book stalls in Paris to serve to expand his coverage of European topics. But most interestingly, this is where the Americana collections of the Library of Congress grew. Because most Americana was available in France and not in the colonies. He sent back trunk loads of books not only to his own library but to Madison to help Madison write The Federalist Papers. Interestingly enough, Jefferson had to acquire his copy of The Federalist Papers in Paris. He did buy an extraordinary number of books in in Paris, De Buffon Natural History, as well as Catesby's book on the Carolinas. He after purchasing the Encyclopedia Methodique, Jefferson elicited himself as a representative of the work, not only as an author but as a very aggressive salesman of the Encyclopedia. There are letters to Jeff, from Jefferson to the Planters around him saying, I understand the times are tough, but you subscribe to attend volume work and you've only paid before, and I insist that you continue-- yours truly, Thomas Jefferson. It was rather heavy-handed about the the sales of this. He acquired numerous classical authors. A hodgepodge of additions. Obviously he acquired the underpinnings of the forthcoming French Revolution, but there were travels and voyages, scattered authors and titles. The History of Peru, Spinoza, Krebakur, Study of Roman Law, Books on Bibliography, a Study of American Indians, Ramsey's History of South Carolina. The list is sort of a frenzy, and you can only envision this sort of bibliographic frolic that was going on in Paris at the time. Clearly, the French book market had a profound impact on Jefferson's collection. Not only did it give him the opportunity to elevate his Americana holdings and round out the representation of contemporary 18th century thought, it also transformed his entire notion of collecting across the board. All in all, he purchased 1850 titles in his period and five year stint in Paris. He had doubled again the size of his collection. Years later, our friend Cyrus King from Massachusetts had a few thoughts about this as well. "It might be inferred from the character of the man who collected it and France, where the collection was made, that the library contains irreligious and immoral books, works on French philosophers who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution, which had desolated Europe, and threatens this country as well." This is part of the conversation on the floor of Congress while they're debating Thomas Jefferson's collection. Upon returning to America in 1789, Jefferson possessed the library twice the size of the one he had owned in his departure, and he had a considerable debt to show for it. This debt would remain with him for the rest of his life. From this point on, Jefferson's life was about paying one debt off in order to avoid the next. By 1850, and the Jefferson Collection had grown to the 6487 volumes that he offered Congress for its time and utterly vast and almost incomprehensible collection. A substantial investment, perhaps even an incautious one. Given his own sources of wealth. Jefferson acknowledged that perhaps it was the largest library, but he took his greatest pride in the fact that it was well chosen and intelligently chosen. This was to become the Library of Congress. This was the collection that had nursed the Declaration of Independence. This had guided American diplomacy that had fueled innovations in American technology and that assisted a Virginia planter with his fields. And now this collection, which had been built around Jefferson's notion of universal knowledge, was to serve as the source of inspiration and ideas for the New Republic. Jefferson's books began their journey to Blodgett's hotel, which served as the temporary Capitol building following the fire, in May of 1815. The the library was shipped in the same pine bookcases that had that they had been shelved in for over 50 years. They'd simply been wrapped, taken off the shelf, wrapped, replaced, and then they nailed the board over the front of the bookcase and loaded them up into horse drawn wagons. Jefferson was extremely fastidious about this aspect of his collection and insisted that they take two separate routes so that should any kind of tragedy or worse yet I suppose if Cyrus King got his hands on them were to happen that only half of the collection would be damaged. So they took two separate routes to get to Washington. These horse drawn wagons with nailed bookcases loaded up on them. This is the collection that Jefferson had built and lived with for nearly fifty years. And as it pulled away, he sat down and wrote a note to his friend and newspaper man and the man who helped barter the sale of the collection, Samuel Smith, reflecting that it was unquestionably the choicest collection of books in the United States, and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country. I have a lot of. This is the moment that I most connect with Thomas Jefferson, because I live with the same size collection that we've now restored. And I have a sense of what it would mean to have that taken away from my life in a single day, which is how they were loaded up, nailed up and moved and gone. And when the horse buggies left, Thomas Jefferson sat at Monticello without books. It's a very poignant moment, and I think really for me begins the story of of the passion behind the Library of Congress collections as they still stand today. When the books arrived in Washington, the library found its center and its impetus. Throughout his life, Jefferson had gathered books across a vast spectrum of topics and languages, a collecting urge prompted by what he would later typify in an understated fashion. As a [?] for the diffusion of knowledge, The nation's library today continues to mirror this universal approach to collecting. The world's largest library is also the only National Library that collects extensively internationally in all subjects except for medicine. [ Delayed laughter ] And even there we kind of threatened at the corners. Jefferson strategy for building his library was a practical one. This collection was a working tool rather than a bibliophiles monument. This was a touchstone for him. It's the muse for him as a statesman, as a politician as an architect, as a classicist, as an inventor, as a planter, as a scientist. All of these can be found on his shelves. Well, you would well expect, and it's true that politics and law and history predominate as major subjects. The Jefferson Collection includes domestic sciences, foreign language, dictionaries, rhetoric, poetry, routine working manuals, lumber measurement manuals, brewing manuals. The library's arrangement with Jefferson, described as sometimes analytical, sometimes chronological, sometimes a combination of both, followed a modified version of Francis Bacon's Organization of Knowledge, a system that had been used by d'Alembert and Diderot in the encyclopedia. And that's what you're seeing here. Memory, reason, and imagination. The great triad of the enlightenment, Jefferson turns into history, philosophy, and fine arts. This is Jefferson's manuscript that you're looking at. It's the introduction to the organization of his library. He divides them into these three categories and then they're further parsed into 44 chapters. I believe this is a 4012. This is the first page. This is, I think, the copy that only has 42 or the 44 chapters. But immediately you're introduced to some interesting notions of how intellectual endeavors are divided. We're looking at the page for history or memory. Divided into civil and natural. Physics, Natural History-- can't even read that. What does that say? Can anyone read that? Technical arts. It must be something. Physics then turns into natural philosophy, agriculture, chemistry, surgery and medicine. So in the beginning, which starts with history, you will find the history of classical Rome only a few shelves away from the history of the physical contents of the earth. Geology. This is done, and it's true. If you reconstruct his library and live with it and put it in the same circle that he had. It's possible to stand there when you work with these long enough and understand what this is about, because it allowed Jefferson to turn and reach for a book and understand implicitly where it would be. Given the breakdown of these topics, they tell us a good deal about him. Of course, some of them are familiar to us. Ancient history and American history fall under the broad category of history. But as I was saying, agriculture and surgery and mineralogy do the same thing fall under history. Other groupings speak to Jefferson's own preoccupations. Religion, politics, and ethics all fall under the rubric of what he called moral philosophy. Perhaps the most surprising, or maybe more to the point, the most Jeffersonian aspect of the classical scheme is the relegation of religion to Chapter 17, which is philosophy, moral, jurisprudence, dash, dash, religion. We go back to Cyrus King on this one. This is a gesture that moves well beyond Bacon or d'Alembert or Diderot. This is Thomas Jefferson having experiencing his own enlightenment, I guess. Other categories such as physical mathematics and dialogue epistolary are just 18th century conventions that don't really play out in contemporary disciplines as much as we would like them to. Jefferson's book, book collection, his organization stood as a well source of fact from which he could pull together information and apply it to a changing and shaping society and world. This was not a library of casual learnedness. This was not a gentleman's library. This was the universe of practical and useful thought from which he could alter the world. He referred to it as his own enlightenment. Certainly his beloved classical authors, Greek and Latin, were there, Tacitus and Thucydides as well as Plato, who he summarily dismissed as such nonsense. Alongside books of education, shorthand, gardening, accounting, military strategy, brewing and beekeeping, bookkeeping. Their works on the technical arts, such as Green's work on speech and language for the deaf. James Weston's book on stenography and shorthand. Cryptography, is a great period point of fascination for Jefferson. Caslon's type specimen book is there. There are even two books on aerial station or flying. In several instances. Jefferson actually strikes up an engaging, productive, and sometimes rather learned correspondence with scientists and inventors. Take the case of Robert Fulton. In 1810, Fulton sent 4 copies of his pamphlet on torpedo warfare to Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was already aware of Fulton's work and wrote and responded to his pamphlet. Jefferson had this ability, certainly by 1810, former president, to sort of ponder on people's work and then sort of casually take their work and turning into a metaphor. So his discussion of of torpedoes turned into a long discussion about the idea of progress, the danger of living in the past. Why Connecticut will forever be a lesser state to Virginia because they've not let go of their interactions with the people that they discovered there, only to conclude by saying your torpedoes will be to cities what vaccination has been to mankind. This is Jefferson at his best and his worst, his most stimulating and most vexing. To Fulton, he said, have you thought of working with steam? So--[ Laughter ] so this is a man who takes seriously his role, probably only second to Doctor Franklin in terms of being one of the great minds of America. Nowhere do we find that more so than this particular piece. There are moments, and Thomas Jefferson is a very complicated man, very difficult to, so to speak, live with in our work. But there are moments when you just absolutely adore him, and this is one of them. You're looking at title page from Buffon's Natural History. It's a 10 volume work. Buffon embraced a particularly irritating French attitude in his Natural History by describing the notion of the inferiority of American nature. He asserted that all animal and plant life, including humans, degenerated while in America. [ Laughter ] This was a serious theory. These theories, of course, irritated Jefferson to no end. To refute the assertions by Buffon and others that animal and plant life in America was a faint and smaller shadow of European species, Jefferson asked his friends in America to send Buffon the hides and bones of several large animals. Buffon was inundated with animal parts. Jefferson wrote, "I'm happy to be able to present to you at this moment the bones in the skin of a moose, the horns of another individual of the same species, the horns of the Caribou, the elk, the deer, the spiked horn buck, and the roebuck of America." And then diplomatically concludes by asking the Frenchman to reconsider his views. Jefferson's correspondence is littered with this kind of interaction with the the the academic and thinking world of the 18th and and early 19th century, which would be his place. Regardless of what it's about. Agriculture, the making of a harpsichord, in which he actually has a bespoke harpsichord built for him after he's been unhappy with the plans that have been sent to him. So he corresponds with the harpsichord maker that is best known in France and and orders especially designed harpsichord for himself. He's just a man who worked with his collection in a way to rebuild his world the way he wanted to see it. Catastrophic fire unfortunately again struck the Capitol on Christmas Eve 1851, and it destroyed 2/3 of Thomas Jefferson's book collection. The surviving volumes, which are now housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, still serve Jefferson's driving purpose to have the sum of philosophical and practical endeavor readily available. In celebration of the library's bicentennial in the year 2000, we launched a project to reconstruct the 1815 Thomas Jefferson Collection. That fell to me. I had to find 2/3 of the 6487 volumes matching exactly editions and issues. Some of the matching additions we actually found elsewhere in the library's holdings. We are, after all, at origin, a late 18th early 19th century library. Other missing works we've accumulated through gifts and mostly through purchases. This is a fairly complicated and ambitious project, but I would say we've made rather good progress from the original desiderata. After all was said and done of 1012 items that we unable to locate quickly, the list has been reduced to less than 300. Not bad, right? From 2/3 down to 300. The remaining titles are being sought out on the antiquarium market. We're seeking the scarce as well as just the utterly common, the arcane as well as the mundane. This is the nature of the Antiquarium book market. I'm looking for an a 12 page Italian pamphlet on the nature of the pomegranate tree. We're looking actually looking for books in nine different languages from three centuries, published in all corners of Europe and the New Republic. So far we have accumulated books on education, agriculture, forestry, horse breeding, chemistry, typography, military discipline. As you can see, Jefferson had trouble setting boundaries for his collection. We're still trying to locate an 1804 copy of The Theory and Practice of Brewing. A book that Jefferson had once lent to Captain Merriweather. As in that Merriweather and later urgently recalled from him, this is a note sent via runner with a note saying "we are this very day beginning the business of brewing malt liquor. Send the book." [ Laughter ] Jefferson's collection tells us a great deal not only about him as a collector, but how he viewed the world, his world, the American world. You're looking at a copy from Thomas Jefferson's collection. This is one that survived the fire, a bound set of two pamphlets that originally had been owned by Ben Franklin. This is not uncommon. Actually, you'll see this later on that Jefferson was not a bibliophile collector. At the level of connoisseurship, primacy and condition were not his concern. Content in some cases association as we find here. But it also points out something very different between the two men, which is not hard to discern if you know much about either of them. The 2 pilots that we have here are both in opposition really to the colonies. One is called Reflections, Moral and Political on Great Britain and Her Colonies by Matthew Wheelock, and the other is Thoughts on the Origin and Nature of Government by Alan Ramsey. Jefferson rarely wrote in his books. You could almost say never wrote in his books, doesn't sign his name to the cover, only puts small initials on certain pages, doesn't conveniently highlight passages and say good idea using the Declaration of Independence. He's very blank. And yet we know his correspondence is such that we know that he's read his material. Well, here we have Ben Franklin, who's quite the opposite. Holds nothing back when reading his material. And so Franklin, there. These notes are not you can see only some of them here on the side. This looks dark to me. From here, can you see this? OK, good. You can see here. But there are he sums at the end, you know, nice attempt by a fairly articulate the grossly misled young man you know, he summarizes. But here and this page is a perfect example of Franklin who is who explodes in his marginalia. The gentleman has just he's meandering around the argument of letting go of taxation of the colonies and says, I think if I can find this, a better mode of election may be established to make representation more equal and therefore we might be able to ease off on taxes in the future. This is his sort of throat clearing, that this irritating Franklin to no end and he writes in the in the margin, why don't you just go about and do it. And throughout the pamphlet you see this sort of ha ba, you know, and it's so contrary to Jefferson that it immediately raises in your mind of the question of this the presence of this book and what it means to him. But what it means to him, in fact, is that he purposely acquired this from a Philadelphia book dealer as a memorial to Benjamin Franklin because he was the man he most admired. Jefferson organized everything in his collection, including his political tracks, And on an annual basis he would gather together the pamphlets from the year that he thought were most influential in America, and he would bind them together in a binding called Political Pamphlets. And of the Date in Political Pamphlets 1774 Political Tracks, 1774, we find this Thomas Jefferson's own copy of his own work, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, the work that in 1774 brought Jefferson to the attention of the rest of the colonies at a level that have ultimately led to his being the author of the Declaration of Independence. It's an amazing and very scarce pamphlet, very scarce pamphlet today printed in Williamsburg by Clementina Rind. So we have one of the Williamsburg publication which is scarce, even more scarce, printed by a woman. But what's interesting about it is that Jefferson never intended for this to be published, in fact had nothing to do with the publication. So in one of the few moments in his life, he's actually written by Thomas Jefferson here because the pamphlet is labeled by a native and member of the House of Burgesses. Why is that? This was originally going to be a speech that he was going to present to the House of Burgesses. He fell sick on the on the trip to the convention, handed his talk to somebody and said, would you please read this at the session? This young gentleman being no fool, read it and said there's no way I'm standing in front of these people in reading this because it's merit, according to Jefferson, was that it was the first publication and he's correct about this, that carried that the claim to the rights of the Americans have nothing in common with the claim of rights for Englishmen other than that we live under the same tyrannical king. It's revolution. So rather than read it, they "published for table", as they called it, and had it printed up in Williamsburg. What you're looking at is one of the rare moments in which Jefferson, extremely unhappy about how his prose appeared, writes in every copy he can get his hands on every correction. He never intended this to be published. One of the great disappointments goes on later to have it published, sent off to be printed as part of his own collected works, and talks about the fact that this was much too difficult for people to cope with, but brings him to the attention of the Convention. We can find in Jefferson's collection some of the origins of the thought directly of the thought of the Declaration of Independence. This is Lord Lord Kames or Henry Home, Essays on the Principles, Morality, and Natural Religion, published in 1751. This is an example in which Jefferson has drawn from the the Scottish jurist certain ideas. Kames was part of the Moral Sense school and advocated that men had an inner sense of right or wrong. This is still a part of that Enlightenment conversation at the time. But Kames actually provides the foundation and the language for the notion of the pursuit of happiness that Jefferson appropriates and employs in the Declaration of Independence and a great fan of of Kames-- has every book published. Well. The Jefferson Collection, of course, was the book collection that Jefferson turned to in concocting and developing and writing the draft, finally, of the Declaration of Independence. It's the wrong readings, if you will, and certainly the workshop for his ideas. You're looking at the rough draft of the Declaration in Jefferson's hand. There are certain things that are going on here right away. You can see the word certain has been edited to change, inherent and inalienable to certain inalienable rights. There are changes throughout the text. Jefferson brings his books with him to Philadelphia, later writes about what was useful for him in terms of coming up with these joint selections. I was asked to write a rough draft. Franklin and Adams read it and make 42 changes which just killed him, only to have it go to committee where 39 more changes were made. And he later writes in his in his letters that this was the most painful and excruciating event of his political career with they have his prose altered in this fashion. But nonetheless it becomes the forerunner on July 3rd, late that night of 1776, when this is carried across the street to get turned into this, this is the Dunlap copy, the Dunlap broadsides of the Declaration of Independence printed at night from the draft copy that Jefferson wrote. The um [?Glorial Louia?] copy that you associate with all the signatures is done later, after the fact that you find in the National Archives. The actual announcement of the revolution is here. Enough copies were printed of the Broadsides so that members of the convention could take them back to their constituents, where it'd be red glued to walls, published in newspapers passed around. You're looking at George Washington's copy. The fold marks are there because it was given to him. He folded up, got on horseback and went to the hill and read to the troops, the volunteer troops. Telling them that we've just declared war on the greatest power in the history of the world. So when you think about revolution. In America, you have to think about print, because the only way the Revolution is announced in the 18th century is via this, the signed document. The rough draft is an idea that's unannounced. So there's an intimacy for Jefferson, for revolution, for America, between print and idea and the way in which we lead our lives. And this is a document that's incredibly loaded with that kind of passion and understanding of the period. This is Jefferson's copy of the Federalist Papers is one of his copies. This is a secondhand copy that came to him from Mr. Church, which originally came from his sister Elizabeth Hamilton, who happens to be married to Alexander Hamilton. Those of you who stayed around for your civic lessons remember that the it's a series of pseudonymous essays, all signed "Publius" and the great parlor game of the period was to figure out who had written which essay. Jefferson succumbs, and one of the few times he writes in his books and on the verso of this title page he has essays 3456 by Mr. Hamilton, essays number da da da by Mr. J, the rest are by Mr. Madison. We have Madison's copy, where he's done the same thing, and they don't agree. [ Laughter ] I told you that Jefferson was fond of code and stenography and cryptography and this is the perfect example. Here is a code sheet that Jefferson developed with numbers and letters that he presented to Lewis and Clark that they should take with them on their famous expedition so that if they felt moved, so moved to report to the president via along the road, they could write their message in code. At least it fall into the hands of I'm not sure. So the scheme is a little complicated but just he's concerned that they may not quite understand how to to utilize the code. So on the back he's he's giving them a way of how you translate and then how you number and at the end gives you a full-fledged version of how to code your message. This tells us more about Jefferson's notion of what the Lewis and Clark expedition is than anything else I've seen because of the message he translates for us is "I'm at the head of the Missouri, all's well and the Indians so far friendly." Needless to say, this was never used by Lewis and Clark. And then just as a gesture to Thomas Jefferson, his recipe for ice cream. Why? Well, there happened to be 9 gastronomy books in Jefferson's collection. The New York Post sneered at them because most of them were in foreign languages of the French and dealt with such things as pigs and potatoes, rabbits and pigeons, but nonetheless of course became the foundation for it is now 2 very famous gastronomy collections in the Library of Congress. I have only a few minutes left. I want to just give you a quick taste of the collections that have come to us and now make up the library that was first initiated by Thomas Jefferson. When Jefferson let go of his books, John, when it was announced that they were selling the collection, John Adams wrote to Jefferson saying, by the way, I envy you this immortality. There, the 18th and early 19th century America. The correspondence between the young presidents is always interesting to me. Here's Adams and Jefferson are both finished being president. They've done what they've going to do politically. And here is Adams acknowledging that if all the work that they've done, the great immortality for Thomas Jefferson will be the fact that his book collection, because he comes ensconced, as does the Library of Congress. Jefferson doesn't respond at first, waits until everything is over with, and then writes, "I cannot live without books," and goes on to say, "but fewer of them will suffice if I'm building a collection only for my amusement and my old age." That, by the way, translated into 1000 more books that he bought, which is called his retirement library. So that's the fast story of how the choicest collection of books in the United States laid the foundations for the world's greatest library. It's possible today to select any type of material or format in the collections and somehow relate it back to Jefferson's vision. I'm going to stop here rather than go through a march of materials because of time. But I can say with great earnestness that almost any subject matter that researchers look at today has its origin, in some fashion or another, with Thomas Jefferson's book collection. Whether it be laws regarding women, whether it be gastronomy, agriculture, engineering, physics, poetry, whatever the source, it's present in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson's book collection. He said to Abigail Adams in 1813 that reading was the greatest of all of his amusements. And I think it's his passion and earnest passion around reading that prompted Jefferson to build the library the way he did. And for 50 years it he lived with it. It served him mostly his political vision, but also it shaped his daily life in Monticello, and then became the foundation for a fledgling nation, and for centuries since has served as the nation's library. Reconstructing this provides fresh insights, I believe, into the mind of Thomas Jefferson, reconstructing his book collection, and certainly tells us the world from which he drew his ideas. It was the wellspring to one of the deepest thinkers that America had produced, author of the Declaration of Independence, the third President, a true visionary. In the richly ornamented hall in the building named in his honor, and in its thousands of volumes. We're soon going to make permanent the display of Thomas Jefferson's book collection, so that anyone can rediscover the dialogue Jefferson had with his books, gain a sense of his ideas, his time, the context of his thought. Perhaps most important, it will symbolize and revitalize, I hope, the principle on which the Library of Congress had been built, that knowledge and free access to it by both leaders and the governed is essential to democracy. Thanks. [ Applause ] Do you want to do questions?[Elizabeth Fee:] Yes. Thank you for a wonderful presentation. You all have a microphone in front of you. If you could lean in and speak to the mic everyone will be able to hear you. [Mark Dimunation:] You didn't realize all those asides that you were making to your friend sitting next to you, we're all being picked up on the mic, did you? Yeah, hi. [Audience] What list did you use to reconstruct the library [?]. And was it detailed enough in all cases to know that you got the right addition and the issue of a title.[Mark Dimunation:] This is a really complicated topic. We are using as the basis of reconstructing Thomas Jefferson's Library a 5 volume bibliography done by Millicent Sowerby in the 50s, starting about 1950 through 1959. It is a difficult process because Jefferson's list was very truncated. Very 18th century Sterling Octavo 4 volumes. You pray that there's only one octavo 4 volume edition of Sterling, otherwise you have to do a lot of research. And that's what she did. It took her nine years. She read every scrap of paper in the Thomas Jefferson Manuscript Collection. She transcribed anything in any document that related to any author or book that she found present in the list and put together one of the great bibliographies of the 20th century. We are maintaining that because that's the origin of the Jefferson Collection reconstitution at the Library of Congress. She was often incorrect and we've made a lot of of of Corrections to that. But it was a a mammoth project and a really magnificent piece of work on her part. Since then, since that's publication, there has been discovered tryst list. It's referred to then the first librarian of Congress is demonized in the world of bibliography because he lost Thomas Jefferson's book list. And in the process, when he arranged Jefferson's collection when I first came in, muddled. Now you see you've heard enough about Thomas Jefferson. You know how this is going to go over. He mixed up the chapters, the 44 chapters, and kind of did his own little version. And Jefferson wrote a letter that he was quite unhappy. And this list then got even more truncated, more confounded. As time went by. It was, I think, in the 80s that the Trist list was found. We realized that there's some errors in the organization. But we're so ensconced with Sour be that we're staying with Sour Bee and owning up to the fact that the Trist list is probably more accurate. Yeah. Well, it needs this material be available online so that more people can connect with it. Well, right. Yes. In fact, the. Was that something I did 00 K? Sorry, I thought. I pressed the button. The the library will be up online and we're slowly digitizing. We've digitized chunks of it. We're not going to digitize all 6487 at the moment because some of these really are just not interesting in that fashion. There are other books to do. But when the exhibition goes up, yes, there'll be a lot of of multimedia page by page. And in fact I can show you what the exhibition looks like. I was getting long winded so I stopped. But I had lots of pretty pictures for you. But I can show you at least what the display looked like will look like. So you get a sense of it because it's really pretty. Gosh, golly, [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] [no speech detected] you've got the lights on. So it mimics the circle and it stands. It stands in one of the great corner rooms of the Library of Congress and follows the order of chapters of these white sections that you see are dummies that we place for books that were missing, that will be replaced as we accumulate them. Obviously this is the first time I did the exhibition and we had about 900 books missing. Now we're down to this 300, but nonetheless we label every book that actually was Thomas Jefferson's and the rest. So all this will the visually will be there. We can we can see the world again. Thanks for Downing the lights but some of the books will be there digitized as well and all the panel text and all that will be there. I think even I'm talking but I'm not so sure that'd be all that interesting. But me? I think I'm there, yacking away, and some download. [no speech detected] This is perhaps a little beyond the Library of Congress's concerns. But are the final retirement library of 1000 volumes still at Monticello? Well, no. The retirement library was sold after Jefferson's death. It was auctioned off by a man named Poor. It's referred to as the poor sale, but everyone thinks it means because he was so broke. But it's the poor sale and the books were distributed, so they're available. You should know. I don't know how many of you work with 18th century books, but in 18th century books you'll notice at the bottom of a page, often times a letter appears, so A then next page A1 or A2A3A4. They're called signatures. It's a way of putting the book together so that the binder doesn't have to read the book or understand the book, and it helps the printer keep track of how they're printing the book. They're called signatures. Jefferson would not write in his books, but he would go to the J signature, which is really an I in the 18th century, and put a T in front of it. And then he'd flip to the back where there's a T Signature and put a J next to it. So anyone who deals with their books, you immediately fall in love with Thomas Jefferson. You see this, and it's just, it's sweet and it's adorable and it's completely perfect. It's perfect. And that means they're about 1000 books floating around in the book market that have Jt's in them. And of course, there's also prompted a lot of forgeries. Monticello is not trying to buy back Jefferson Provenance. As far as I know, they are in the process of creating a massive database of every book Jefferson owned, which is really a big project. I have some. We're talking to them because there's some lack of clarity as to which book represents which library, and since 6487 of them represent my holdings. I don't want people thinking that they're Monticello, but there are books from the retirement library that other people hold. I own about 150 of the retirement library books. The Library of Congress does. Yeah. So it's possible. If you go, it's a great if you know if you're in the right section. 18th century thought mostly open up and look for a T signature. If you see A J, you might be holding one of the Jefferson books, probably from a dealer who doesn't know what they're doing, which is even better because you can get it cheap. So that's it. I would love to. They're going to recreate it virtually, but they're not going to go out and accumulate the books. It's a shame, actually. I wish they would. Yeah. I'm curious, what what is the world of 18th century book collectors like? How many are there in the colonies? Is Jefferson notable among them? Well, it's. Yeah, it's it's. Yeah, there are a number that are notable. It's a different world in the sense that it's your only access to to text collecting. What we would call collecting is in fact access to text in the 18th century. There are, there are none to speak up really. Libraries, your only access is through whatever comes from Europe and what's printed in the colonies and the fairly fledgling Press of colonial America. And so almost every plant, every planter has a collection. There are a good number. Peter Forest Collection, The Reynolds Collection. There are a number of collections that are Rab Adams in this very sweet letter in which Adam says I envy you this immortality. He later just can't help himself but enter back into competition and say, I only own half the number of books you own. But so Adams has about 3000. It's the only way in which learned individuals in the colonies could really live in the world of ideas was to buy the books and bring them in. So that's the nature of 18th century collecting in the colonies, which is why colonial provenance books always they look like workaday books, as opposed to the royal collections or the landed collections or the gentlemen collections of 18th century England where they're all dressed up with no place to go. These are workaday books by and large. Only in Philadelphia, a couple of New York collections do you have the dress up dressed up kind of connoisseur collections. One of our young graduate students visiting Jefferson becomes famous because he develops a sense of connoisseurship about prints. So it's the emergence of that kind of level of consourship in America. Comes with the generation after Jefferson. Yep. Hi. Hi. Yes. So I'm wondering up how soon after the library was purchased, did it become available to the public for use? They published a catalog in 1815. I'm not sure if in this period of time the flight, the, the, the renamed Congressional Library, now Library of Congress was at that point a Public Library. It's the first time I've ever been asked that question and I don't know the answer to that. Maybe somebody here does. We of course, now, when we go on the road, always remind people that every single thing you've seen, you can come into the Bear Book division, if you're over 18 and call it up and look at it medieval manuscript and cunable, whatever. We're a Public Library. But in 1815, I don't know, you'd have to go to Blodgett Hotel. I'm not sure they were quite set up for that. But the catalog was published relatively early. There's another one that comes out again in response to Jefferson's objection when the librarian loses the list, and that sets off a whole wave of bad catalogs. But the first Library of Congress catalog is fairly early letterpress, very short entry, last name, 1st 5 words of title, city format when I called. When I was looking for the collective works of Thomas Stern for this collection, I called Quart, which is a very famous book dealer in in London. For those of you who don't live in this world renowned for especially English literature and I'm looking for the collective works of Thomas Stern, language author. And I called and I said I'm trying to find the the, the 4th Dublin edition of Thomas Stern's collected works, thinking this would be one of the fast ones. I could just pick up and move on, right? And there's dead silence on the phone. I'm like, did I say that right? And I'm looking to make sure I've got it, you know it's right. And I said is there a problem? And this is the expert on the century of the century of that literature. I didn't know there was a first double in addition of Thomas Stern's works, let alone a fourth. What are you looking for? And I said, this is Thomas Jefferson's book collection. Oh my God. That started a long conversation about the love, the kind of collecting which was sometimes books by the box as far as Jefferson was concerned. So sometimes these truncated entries are difficult to cope with. Because of that. [Elizabeth Fee:] Any other comments or questions? [Mark Dimunation:] Please come see us at the Library of Congress when you get off this gorgeous campus, lovely campus. And thank you again for a really delightful day.[Elizabeth Fee:] Thank you. [ Applause ] [ Fade to black ]