Mr. Jefferson's Books

Though I am not a fan of Jefferson, it would be fun to see his library.



A Founding Father’s Books Turn Up
By SAM ROBERTS
Published: February 21, 2011


Thomas Jefferson, above in a portrait by Gilbert Stuart, obtained thousands of books in his lifetime but many were sold by his heirs to pay off his debts.
The 28 titles in 74 volumes were discovered recently in the collection of Washington University in St. Louis, immediately elevating its library to the third largest repository of books belonging to Jefferson after the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia.

“My reaction was: ‘Yes! It makes sense,’ ” said Shirley K. Baker, Washington University’s vice chancellor for scholarly resources and dean of university libraries. “It strikes me as particularly appropriate these are in Missouri. Jefferson bought this territory, and we in Missouri identify with him and honor him. And I was thrilled at the detective work our curators had done.”

The Washington University library learned of the Jefferson bonanza a few months ago from Endrina Tay, project manager for the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries project at Monticello, the former president’s home near Charlottesville, Va., a National Historic Landmark. She has been working since 2004 to reconstruct Jefferson’s collection and make the titles and supplemental reference materials available online. Jefferson had several collections, including 6,700 books that he sold to the Library of Congress in 1815 after the British burned Washington. Writing to John Adams that “I cannot live without books” and confessing to a “canine appetite for reading,” Jefferson immediately started another collection that swelled to 1,600 books by the time he died on July 4, 1826. That collection became known as his retirement library.

Those books were dispersed after Jefferson’s heirs reluctantly decided to sell them at auction in 1829 to pay off Jefferson’s debts; auction catalogs survive, but not a record of who bought the books. The retirement collection is the least known of Jefferson’s libraries and one in which classics were represented in disproportionately greater numbers than politics and the law. He cataloged all 1,600 books according to “the faculties of the human mind,” like memory, reason and imagination, and then classified them further. Many were in French or Italian.

“Currently Monticello and the University of Virginia have the largest concentrations of books from the retirement library,” said Kevin J. Hayes, an English professor at the University of Central Oklahoma and the author of “The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson.” “This new find would put Washington University among them. The question I would like to answer is: Do they contain any marginalia? Sometimes Jefferson wrote in his books; his marginalia would enhance both the scholarly and the cultural value of the books immeasurably.”

The answer is yes. Jefferson initialed his books (to affirm his ownership), often corrected typographical errors in the texts and also occasionally wrote marginal notes or comments about the substance. Researchers are combing the newly discovered collection to find such notations.

“These books add a dimension to the study of the life of Jefferson at Monticello,” Ms. Tay said. “They expand our understanding and give us a tangible connection. It helps us understand how Jefferson used his books — whether they were well worn, which means he read them often. Some have annotations, and two architectural volumes include notations of calculations that Jefferson made.”

She explained that while there was no plan to reassemble the retirement library at Monticello, all of the information about it would be placed in a database.

“The physical collection is not as critical as what it represents intellectually,” Ms. Tay said. “What did he read? Where did he get his ideas? What influenced him?”

Armed with the auction catalog, Ms. Tay found letters suggesting that Joseph Coolidge of Boston, who met one of Jefferson’s granddaughters at Monticello and later married her, submitted lists of the books he wanted to buy.

Coolidge wrote Nicholas Philip Trist, who married another Jefferson granddaughter, saying, “If there are any books which have T. J. notes or private marks, they would be interesting to me.” He added, “I beg you to interest yourself in my behalf in relation to the books; remember that his library will not be sold again, and that all the memorials of T. J. for myself and children, and friends, must be secured now! — this is the last chance!”

Ms. Tay also found an annotated auction catalog with the letter “C” written next to a number of items, which seemed to indicate that Coolidge had bid successfully.

While she was tracking down the retirement library, one of her fellow Monticello scholars, Ann Lucas Birle, was researching a book about the Coolidges and, searching Google Books, found a reference in The Harvard Register to a gift in 1880 from a Coolidge son-in-law, Edmund Dwight, to a fellow Harvard alumnus and possible relative, William Greenleaf Eliot, a founder of Washington University.

“It could have been his parents have died, he’s left with 3,000 books, what should he do with these that would really do good?” Dean Baker said. “A great-uncle just founded a new university. If you send them to a university that doesn’t even have 3,000 books, it could make a world of difference.”

The discovery that the 3,000 books in the Coolidge collection included 74 that once belonged to Jefferson means that about half of his retirement library has been accounted for. It has also prompted a search by librarians at Washington University to determine whether any other books in the Coolidge collection had been Jefferson’s.