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Commissioned to honor Thomas Jefferson's 200th birthday, E. Millicent Sowerby's monumental bibliography recreates the list of books Jefferson sold to the Library of Congress in 1815, after their holdings of 3,000 volumes were destroyed by fire by the British (during the War of 1812) in 1814. He had accumulated the largest personal library in the United States, and his generous offer more than doubled the Library's original holdings. Sold for the sum of $23,950. for 6487 volumes, the books form the nucleus around which the present collections of the Library of Congress have been assembled. Also known as the Sowerby Catalogue, it is based on Jefferson's personal catalogue and the 1839 catalogue of the Library of Congress (the first to incorporate Jefferson's books). This invaluable resource with extensive annotations is the most comprehensive and detailed bibliography of the largest and most important American library of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer. --Thomas Jefferson If there were withdrawn from the Library of Congress as it now exists everything which grew from the roots Jefferson planted, and everything which relates to the spirit Jefferson breathed, there would be little of its greatness left. --Archibald MacLeish, from his introduction to Justice Frankfurter on the occasion of the Library of Congress bicentennial commemoration of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, April 13, 1942

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9781584777809

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