A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books

by Nicholas Basbanes

  As he wrote on, Jefferson could not resist the temptation to crow a little about what he had assembled. It was a collection, he proclaimed, that “probably can never again be effected, because it is hardly probable that the same opportunities, the same time, industry, perseverance and expense, with the same knowledge of the bibliography of the subject would again happen to be in concurrence.” Jefferson estimated the size— a bit on the high side, as it turned out—at “between nine and ten thousand volumes,” with the content “chiefly valuable to science and literature generally,” though extending “more particularly to whatever belongs to the American statesman.” In sum, he asserted, “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.” Regarding condition, “nearly the whole” were “well bound,” an “abundance of them elegantly,” and represented “the choicest editions existing.”

  Even though Jefferson was financially burdened at the time and needed money to satisfy some debts, there is nothing in his letter to indicate he was motivated by profit. In fact, on the matter of value, he proposed that Congress choose a qualified appraiser to determine a fair price, and since an expensive war was still being waged, he made clear that extended payments would be acceptable. “The Sage of Monticello,” as Dumas Malone anointed him in a magisterial biography, was adamant on just one point: the library could not be broken up and sold in parts. “My desire is either to place it in their hands entire, or to preserve it so here.”

  Jefferson enclosed a handwritten catalogue with his letter, and asked that both items be forwarded to the Joint Library Committee for consideration. Within a week the Senate endorsed a motion to purchase the books, then sent the matter on to the House of Representatives, where it encountered unexpected resistance. Positions were decidedly political— Southern Democrats supported their colleague from Virginia, Northeastern Federalists were largely opposed—but because the formal debate centered on literary merit, it is instructive nonetheless. Cyrus King of Massachusetts led the assault: “It might be inferred from the character of the man who collected it, and from France, where the collection was made, that the library contained irreligious and immoral books, the works of French philosophers, who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution, which has desolated Europe and extended to this country.” Jefferson’s books, King declared, were “good, bad, and indifferent, old, new, and worthless, in languages which many can not read, and most ought not.”

  Other members expressed similar complaints. One had heard that Jefferson’s library included books by French radicals, specifically Jean-Jacques Rousseau; another was scandalized by the inclusion of the works of Voltaire. Another pointedly condemned the political philosophy of John Locke, enthusiastically embraced by the nation’s founders just a few decades earlier. A member from New York wondered how the business of elected representatives could possibly be served by books printed in dead tongues such as Greek and Latin. As Jefferson had anticipated, there was talk about buying the library piecemeal, a proposal that was quickly “negatived.” Representative King then suggested that Congress buy all the books, and “as soon as said library shall be received at Washington, to select therefrom all books on an atheistical, irreligious, and immoral tendency, if such there be, and send the same back to Mr. Jefferson without any expense to him.” But King “thought proper afterward to withdraw” the motion, and it never reached the floor of the House.

  Though cost was an issue, the intrinsic worth of the collection was never in dispute. An unidentified correspondent for the National Intelligencer and Washington Advertiser wrote on November 16, 1814, that Jefferson’s library

  is such as to render all valuation absurd and impossible, if valuation were admitted into literature. It is such a library as cannot be bought in the ordinary mode in which books are purchased, because many of the books that are inestimable are wholly out of print, and many in manuscript that, of course, could not be procured. I have had an opportunity, from the privilege of frequent examinations, imperfectly to discover that it is unique,— a library which, for its selection, rarity and intrinsic value, is beyond all price.

  Following Jefferson’s recommendation, Congress retained a Georgetown bookseller, Joseph Milligan, who appraised the collection on a flat-rate basis: ten dollars for a folio, six dollars for a quarto, three dollars for an octavo, and one dollar for a duodecimo. (A folio is approximately twelve by fifteen inches, whose leaves are made from sheets of paper folded once. An octavo is about six by nine inches.) Using that formula, Milligan arrived at a value of $23,950 for the 6,487 books found in the collection, or an average of $3.69 per volume, an unqualified bargain even then.

  On January 30, 1815, after four months of angry debate, a final vote was taken in the House of Representatives. Eighty-one members were in favor of the measure and seventy-one were opposed, with most following partisan lines. Though Vermont supported the purchase, New York and the rest of New England were against it. The ten-vote margin of victory was assured when Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware formed a tenuous alliance with Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Louisiana.

  In a 1939 monograph, Randolph G. Adams, at that time director of the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, examined the educational backgrounds of members of the thirteenth Congress and determined that of the 49 members with college degrees, 15 voted for the library and 35 were opposed. Breaking the numbers down further, by college, 10 Harvard graduates who voted all were against acquiring the library, as were the 11 members holding degrees from Yale. Figures for other Ivy League schools were similar but less dramatic. Of the 130 members of Congress who did not graduate from any college, 30 opposed it, but 100 were in favor. “This is an interesting commentary upon Mr. Jefferson’s confidence in the common man,” Randolph Adams noted wryly, and concluded: “So it was the South, with its sparsely settled Piedmont and its backwoods; it was the newly admitted states beyond the mountains; and it was the state of Louisiana, which joined with Pennsylvania to save for the Library of Congress the library of a book collector President.”

  Still difficult to explain is why Senator Rufus King of New York, a former minister to Great Britain and noted bibliophile in his own right, or why Timothy Pitkin of Connecticut, one of the most respected historians of his day, both fought with such conviction against the library. Equally perplexing is the opposition of Christopher Gore of Massachusetts, a former president of the Massachusetts Historical Society and benefactor of the Harvard College Library. And there was Daniel Webster—a graduate of Dartmouth College and a first-term representative from New Hampshire, though “still in a provincial stage,” according to Dumas Malone—who not only cast a negative vote, but delivered a speech in opposition. Then again, as Randolph Adams mused, “This Webster lived to change his mind on many subjects,” a characteristic that may explain why several years later the Great Orator ordered Birds of America from John James Audubon but never paid the amount due—an oversight, perhaps, but one with ramifications still felt today. Failing to secure full payment, Audubon did not ship the fourth and final volume, leaving Dartmouth College—since 1965 the owner of Webster’s double elephant folios of Audubon’s work—with an incomplete set of the landmark books that is now worth millions of dollars.

  Nevertheless, at a single stroke the Library of Congress more than doubled the holdings it had lost in the fire and took a first step toward achieving the kind of greatness that can be measured only on an international scale, against the British Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, and the Vatican Library. Packed in the long pine boxes that the collector-president Jefferson had designed as modular cases and arranged according to his precise scheme, the books were ready for installation upon arrival. It took ten wagons to transport them from Monticello to Washington; as the final shipment was being readied for departure,
Jefferson wrote another letter to Samuel Smith. “It is the choicest collection of books in the United States, and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.” Jefferson’s classification scheme was patterned on Sir Francis Bacon’s concepts of the “three faculties needed to comprehend knowledge,” memory, reason, and imagination, from which he derived forty-four subject divisions. His system was maintained through the end of the nineteenth century, and it not only influenced the kinds of books that were acquired, but created an institution that served the entire nation, not just politicians and bureaucrats.

  Jefferson’s first library, gathered while he was a law student at William and Mary College, had been destroyed by a fire at his mother’s home in 1770; the Capitol fire of 1814 prompted him to sell his second collection to the nation. In 1851, yet another blaze destroyed four thousand volumes of the Jefferson collection, but by then, at least, a course had been fixed. A brilliant core had shaped the direction of the Library of Congress. According to the institution’s curator of rare books, Jefferson’s spirit is its soul.

  Thirty-three years after the debate over the acquisition of Jefferson’s collection for the Library of Congress, a similar opportunity arose, this time involving George Washington’s books. Though Congress in 1834 had acquired for $20,000 a voluminous archive of important letters and documents known as the Washington Papers, the matter of books still shelved at Mount Vernon was unresolved. Many of them had been signed by the first president, many of them bore his bookplate, many of them were elegantly bound in calfskin and tooled with emblematical designs. Pressed for money, Washington’s heirs offered the government first refusal, but after finding no interest, sold them in 1848 to Henry Stevens, the Vermont native who became a wealthy bookseller by skillfully working a lively trade on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Stevens promptly announced with characteristic swagger that he intended to sell Washington’s books to the British Museum.

  In his Recollections of James Lenox—which some readers feel is really a disguised memoir of Henry Stevens—Stevens recalled paying $3,000 for “about 300 volumes” containing Washington’s autograph. When a “great hue and cry” was raised against his plan to ship Washington’s books out of the country, Stevens reluctantly agreed to sell them to a “parcel of Bostonians for $5,000.” After “passing that old Boston hat round for two or three months for $50 subscriptions, only $3,250 could be raised, and therefore, as I had used a few hundred dollars of the money advanced to me by the promoters and was in a tight place, I was compelled to subscribe the rest myself to make up the amount of the purchase.” Stevens found it prudent not to mention the advice he received from Obadiah Rich, another American bookseller who worked out of London. “You will find eventually that you have committed a great mistake in purchasing the so-called Washington Library,” Rich wrote. “I recommend you most sincerely to dispose of them in the only place where they would be properly valued,” Boston or New York.

  The “parcel” of seventy spirited citizens who “passed the hat” to keep George Washington’s books in the United States were all members of the Boston Athenæum, a private reading society established in 1807 that by mid-century ranked among the five largest libraries in the United States. From the very beginning of its existence, the Athenæum made it a policy to keep everything that was acquired. “The idea was to get popular and interesting things for the members to read,” John Lannon, the current head of acquisitions, explained. “With the passage of time, so many of the books we bought became very important. Before we knew it, we were a research library by default.”

  While the Mount Vernon books are certainly the Athenæum’s most famous possession, undeniably its oddest is Narrative of the life of James Allen, alias Burby Grove, the memoirs of a dangerous highwayman finally brought to justice after he was caught robbing a stagecoach. As he lay dying in prison, Allen asked that the reflections he wrote while incarcerated be bound with his own hide and given to John Fenno, the Athenæum member who had brought about Allen’s capture. Printed in 1837—and bound as directed—the grim volume was withdrawn from general display several years ago because it detracted too much from everything else in the otherwise sedate neo-Palladian building. “The fact is that the book has no literary merit whatsoever,” Lannon said. “It was always the binding that made it interesting.”

  A society of collectors performs a number of valuable services, not least of which is sponsorship of worthwhile projects. For instance, the finest collection of imprints produced in the Confederate States of America to be found anywhere, about six thousand items, is not in Atlanta or Richmond or Austin, but in the Boston Athenæum. (Imprint generally means a publisher’s mark, but the author uses imprint to mean any published item.) In June 1865, two months after the Civil War ended, Francis Parkman, the great nineteenth-century historian, decided to gather all the newspapers, books, periodicals, broadsides, sheet music, tracts, and almanacs printed in the South during the war that he could find and deposit them in a place he felt would be safe. Parkman received an initial stipend of $500 from the Athenæum’s directors to help underwrite the search and was assisted in the project by William F. Poole. “We have been and still are the largest buyers in the south and our greatest competitor has been the prices we have ourselves given,” Poole wrote to one Virginia woman who wanted more money than she was being offered. “We are making our collection for preservation, and not for sale or speculation: and having ample means we are disposed to give liberal prices.” The woman thanked Poole for his candor, and promptly sold her copies of the Richmond Dispatch for $175. “Parkman was following his historian’s instincts,” John Lannon said. “He knew that once the war was over, these materials would be destroyed, lost, or suppressed. What is important is not that any individual item is especially rare, but that the archive is so comprehensive. This is the Confederate imprint collection by which all others are judged.”

  Today, nobody questions the wisdom of spending money on a run of Confederate imprints, or seventy men’s passing “that old Boston hat” among themselves to acquire three hundred autographed books from George Washington’s library. A reminder of how sagacious that purchase was came on January 31, 1990, when Washington’s two-volume autographed copy of The Federalist was bought in New York for $1.65 million by an anonymous collector, who then placed it on “extended deposit” in the Chapin Library at Williams College.

  Clearly, by the mid-nineteenth century, collecting had begun to change in America. No longer were books just tools for scholars and historians. They had become valuable objects in their own right, though there was still a long way to go. “This country is sadly in want of books,” the Reverend Luther Farnham declared in an 1855 survey of private American libraries, called A Glance at Private Libraries, the first study of its kind to be done in the United States. “We have not a single library with one hundred thousand volumes, while there are several in Europe with five times this number of books, and one or two with a million or more.” And what America did have, he added, was “as much wanting in the quality” as in quantity.

  Farnham was also concerned with public book collections. He understood, however, that a developing nation had more pressing priorities than institutional libraries. In the 1855 survey he noted that “there were many things that necessarily preceded large public collections of books. The land was to be cleared and cultivated. After bread came the church, the school-house, and the town-house, and such collections of books as might be expected in a new country of vast material resources, that began early to mature, and that are now developed with wonderful activity.” He confidently predicted that “a few years more only will be needed to give us, at least, two or three collections of books of two hundred thousand volumes each; and looking forward half a century, we can see a national library of half a million or a million tomes.” Farnham’s survey followed by four years Charles Coffin Jewett’s Notices of Public Libraries in the United States of America, which reported a state-by-state
, city-by-city census of institutional library holdings, reinforcing Farnham’s findings. By Jewett’s reckoning, there were in the United States 2,201,632 volumes in 694 libraries in 1850. Only five repositories had fifty thousand or more books: Harvard University, 84,200; the Library Company of Philadelphia, 60,000; Yale College, 50,481; the Library of Congress, 50,000; and the Boston Athenæum, 50,000.

  Libraries formed by private collectors filled the void in the meantime. “The few private libraries of Boston and neighborhood, that we have found the time to glance at, have revealed quite unexpected riches.” Farnham identified eighty-two libraries with a total of 298,625 volumes and 12,000 pamphlets, averaging about 3,500 volumes per library. The ten largest, “by pretty careful estimate,” contained a total of 92,000 volumes, and the twelve largest had more than 100,000 volumes. “It is safe to say, that we have thirty other private libraries that will give an aggregate of one hundred thousand volumes”—all in all, he felt, a “pretty good story for one little section of the country.”

  Among the libraries Farnham cited were those of Edward Everett, William Prescott, Franklin Haven, Rufus Choate, George Livermore, Dr. John C. Warren, and Edward A. Crowninshield, owner of “a perfect copy of the old Bay Psalm Book.” Individual rarities he mentioned are Shakespeare folios and quartos, an Eliot Bible, and “quite a collection of the Greek and Latin classics.” Another collector, David Sears, was “particularly rich in French literature,” including Voltaire in seventy volumes and “a pretty good variety of English books.” George Ticknor’s library of thirteen thousand volumes was “one of the most distinguished,” since it contained “the choicest collection of Spanish books” known anywhere outside of Spain. “Thus we have found three libraries on Park Street, containing about twenty thousand volumes, and if we embrace the choice library of Mr. Ticknor, we shall have thirty-three thousand on one short street, all belonging to persons, living almost in adjoining dwellings. Such another cluster cannot, we suspect, be found in this section of the country.”