In August, 1814, British
forces burned Washington D.C., the capital of the young United States of
America. Capital Hill was damaged by the flames, and the Library of Congress
was lost. Luckily for the fledgling country, one of the founding fathers of the
United States had an obsessive addiction to collecting books. Furthermore, he
was plagued by debts and was more than willing to sell his possessions.
In 1815, Thomas Jefferson
sold an enormous collection of 6,487 books to the government for an estimated
total of $23,950. The collection contained both ancient classics and modern
works—Jefferson’s favorite ancient author was Cicero, by whom he owned at least
forty texts. The wide variety of genres and topics in the collection caused a
stir among the members (and observers) of the Congress, who thought that the U.
S. government should not have paid for some of the odd volumes that Jefferson
stumbled across during his studies.
Despite Jefferson’s still
existent debts, he continued to buy an endless supply of books, even after
selling thousands to the Library of Congress. When he died in 1826, he had
still been burdened by a debt of $107,000—a sum that equates to more than 2
million modern U. S. dollars. Shortly after his death, Jefferson’s second
massive collection of books (numbering in the thousands) was auctioned off,
along with most of his other possessions.
Sadly, on the Christmas Eve
of 1851, around 2/3 of Jefferson’s original contribution to the Library of
Congress was lost in another fire. Interestingly, the Library of Congress is
trying to procure copies of the texts that were destroyed.
Written by C. Keith Hansley.
Picture attribution: (Portrait of Thomas Jefferson, by Mather Brown
(1761–1831), in front of a library painted by Rudolf von Alt (1812–1905), both images are [Public Domain]
via Creative Commons).
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