At Home: A Short History of Private Life

by Bill Bryson

Congress may not have been especially grateful for this windfall, but the purchase gave the infant United States the most sophisticated governmental library in the world and completely redefined such a library’s role. Government libraries previously had been mere reference rooms, designed for strictly utilitarian purposes, but this was to be a comprehensive, universal collection—an entirely different concept. Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 115 million books and related items. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s part of it didn’t last long. Thirty-six years after the Jefferson library was purchased, early on a Christmas Eve morning, one of the chimneys in the Capitol library caught fire. Because it was early and a holiday, no one was around to notice the fire or check its spread. By the time the blaze was discovered and brought under control, most of the collection was destroyed, including Jefferson’s precious copy of I quattro libri. The year of the fire, it almost goes without saying, was 1851.