In 1822 John Adams, our second president, bequeathed his library to the town of Quincy, MA. In 1894 after living in six different locations the library came to rest at the Boston Public Library. They just staged the exhibit John Adams Unbound. It was the first time his library of 3,500 volumes was together for public view. It was the culmination of a three-year project by the Boston Public Library to catalog, preserve, digitize and provide access to Adams’s extraordinary library.”
There is an outstanding online component which includes an audio tour of the exhibit and many highlight from the library.
Some library tidbits:
-Adams’s copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution is his most heavily annotated book containing over 10,000 handwritten words
-there are books in eight languages
-The heaviest book weighs 22 pounds and the smallest is 4.7 inches high
-There are 92 works where someone removed Adams’s signature from at least one volume
As impressive as the Adams library is it pales in comparison to the library of the man who followed Adams into the oval office, Thomas Jefferson.
When the British burned the U.S. Capitol in 1814 the then 3,000-volume Library of Congress went up in smoke with the Capitol. Jefferson offered Congress his personal library as a replacement.
Asking price:
Whatever Congress wanted to pay him for it. No strings attached.
Congress paid Jefferson almost $24,000 for over 6000 books.
The final price was “based on measurements of the sizes of the books.”
When the deal was done Jefferson had a bookseller, Joseph Milligan, come to Monticello to help pack the books and get them to Washington. And when they got to the capitol Jefferson told Milligan that he would “arrange and number all the books according as they stand in the catalogue.” Jefferson preferred to arrange his books by subject rather than alphabetically which was the method used by libraries.
It was the best collection of books in the country and the 6000 books doubled the size of the Library of Congress.
But in keeping with our country’s political framework there was some opposition to the library. “Some congressmen were particularly concerned that there were large numbers of books in foreign languages and about subjects not believed germane for the use of Congress.”
The Presidential Libraries of our time are different animals and they have nothing to with the storage of the knowledge that was important to the President it is solely a repository for the archives of their term in office. Franklin Roosevelt came up with the idea in his second term.
They are archives and museums not libraries and technically the name should change.
It would be great if they were indeed libraries and did house the books that were in our President’s personal library. It would tell us so much about our leaders though leaving it to one’s imagination to wonder what books might be in a particular president’s library is half the fun.
I propose that every candidate have a Shelfari page so we can see what books are in their library. I know it would help me decide who to vote for.