The World’s Greatest Library

The Library of Congress’s majestic Main Reading Room.

(Library of Congress/ Michael Dersin)

Established 206 years ago today, on April 24, 1800, the Library of Congress was initially intended merely to provide reference assistance for a small number of government workers. But thanks in large part to the efforts of one visionary Civil War-era assistant librarian, it was ultimately built up into one of the most impressive repositories of human knowledge on the planet.

It contains more than 130 million items in its collections, including 29 million books, 58 million manuscripts, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 2.7 million recordings. No one could have imagined that at the start.

During the very first session of the United States Congress, in New York City in 1789, Rep. Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, proposed appointing a committee to determine what books Congress would need to own to do its job. Books were haphazardly bought as Congress needed them over the next 11 years, including copies of The History of England by David Hume, Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone, and the Swiss legal expert Emerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations. When the government prepared to move to the District of Columbia, in 1800, Congress’s unofficial collection still held only 243 books.

The bill that officially moved the seat of government to Washington also provided $5,000 for “the purchase of such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress . . . and for fitting up a suitable apartment for containing them.” On April 24, 1800, President John Adams signed the bill, and 740 volumes and three maps were ordered from England for the new library, which would be housed in the Capitol.

In 1802 the office of librarian of Congress was established, and President Thomas Jefferson, a voracious reader who personally bought some 200 books a year, chose for the job the Clerk of the House of Representatives, John J. Beckley. The library remained very utilitarian. Jefferson stated that it should not contain “books of entertainment” or “books in other languages, where there are not translations of them.”

In August 1814, during the War of 1812, British forces burned down the Capitol, completely destroying the Library of Congress in the process. The next month ex-President Jefferson offered to sell the government his own personal library at Monticello to replace the books. He needed the money. Now in his seventies, he was on the brink of financial disaster after unfortunate land and crop dealings. His vast collection, by the standards of the time, of 6,487 volumes was eclectic and wide-ranging, including works on science, government, and literature. He had purchased them all over Europe over the course of four decades.

Congress approved a bill to buy the books for the princely sum of $23,950. (In 1825 another Capitol fire, this time started by an errant candle, would threaten the library but would be checked before doing much damage.) Congress approved steadily increasing appropriations for new books, on a growing number of subjects, over the next few decades, but no dramatic growth happened until 1865, when Ainsworth Rand Spofford was serving as the chief assistant to librarian of Congress, John G. Stephenson.

Spofford did most of the librarian’s work for him, as Stephenson was busy serving as a colonel in the Civil War—most notably at the battle of Gettysburg. Spofford had many influential friends in Washington, including Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase and future Presidents (and fellow Ohioans) Rutherford B. Hayes and James A. Garfield, and he was able to help bring about significant increases in funding for the library. When Stephenson retired, in 1864, President Lincoln named Spofford as his replacement, and the new Librarian used his pull to wrangle $160,000 from Congress early the next year to build two new permanent wings at the Capitol—tripling the shelf space for the library’s expanding collections. He also helped engineer a key change to the copyright law, requiring that copies of all newly copyrighted works be sent to the Library of Congress; later the copyright office itself would be absorbed into the library. By 1872 the collections contained nearly a quarter of a million volumes.

From the start, Spofford had a much grander view of the library than did his predecessors. He saw it not as a Congressional offshoot but as “the great national library of the United States,” which “should contain all publications relating to our own country.” In 1877 the incoming President, Rutherford B. Hayes, echoed Spofford’s conception in his State of the Union address, and encouraged the library’s enlargement.

By now, a new building with much more space was clearly needed, and Spofford directed his considerable energies toward getting a massive $6.3 million structure, named for President Jefferson, built. The 326,000-square-foot edifice would open in 1897 after 10 years of construction and include a reading room under a 195-foot dome as well as murals and sculptures worthy of the national monument the library now was. That same year, Spofford, now in his seventies, stepped down after more than three decades as librarian of Congress—though he stayed on in his old position, as chief assistant librarian, until his death in 1908.

Since then all the librarians of Congress—including the poet and writer Archibald MacLeish—have followed Spofford’s example in working to expand the library’s scope and resources. The current librarian, James H. Billington, presides over 530 miles of bookshelves. His institution is far more than a reference service for Congressmen. It’s an invaluable resource for all Americans—indeed, for all the people of the world.

—David Rapp has written about history for American Heritage, Technology Review, and Out.