LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
The Library of Congress, the world’s largest and most elaborate building devoted wholly to library uses, occupies two city squares east of and facing the Capitol Grounds, also an addition recently completed.
The architecture is of the Italian Renaissance order, from plans made by J. J. Smithmeyer and Paul Pelz, and modified by Edward P. Casey. The exterior walls are of New Hampshire granite. Fifty masters of painting and sculpture worked together to make it a treasure house of the best contemporary American art, fit to shelter one of the greatest libraries of the world. Army engineers superintended its construction.
Begun in 1886, completed in 1897, the building measures 340 feet by 470 feet and covers about 3¹⁄₂ acres. Its cost to date has been $7,868,951. The addition was designed by Pierson & Wilson, architects of Washington, and built of Georgia marble.
In front of the Library is a bronze fountain by Hinton Perry, sculptor, representing the Court of Neptune.
The grand stair hall of the entrance pavilion is of Italian white marble, is particularly beautiful at night, when visitors delight to see it. It leads to the great rotunda, which is the reading room. To the right are the library rooms of Senators and Representatives and the periodical room. To the left are the rooms for the blind and the conservatory of music.
On the second floor at the head of the staircase is Elihu Vedder’s famous mosaic, Minerva. On this floor also are on exhibition the original Declaration of Independence, the original Constitution of the United States, and the Gutenberg Bible. To the right is the prints division, now called the division of fine arts, and to the left the manuscripts division.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS—GRAND STAIRCASE
The reading room contains the card-index catalogue of the books in the Library, will accommodate 1,000 readers at a time, and is free to any reader over 16 years of age. The alcoves are devoted to books on particular subjects.
The reading room is under the dome, which is 100 feet in diameter and 195 feet high to the lantern. In the lantern of the dome is a female figure indicating Human Understanding, and on the collar surrounding the lantern, 150 feet in circumference, is the Evolution of Civilization, symbolic of the 12 nations and epochs which have contributed to the world’s advance—both great works of art by Edwin Howland Blashfield. The dome is beautifully decorated, and the series of statues in bronze by famous American sculptors at intervals on the balustrade encircling the rotunda make the scene impressive.
The pillars in the rotunda are 40 feet high, the windows 32 feet wide.
There are 16 bronze statues surrounding the railing of the gallery under the dome, representing leaders in great fields of learning, as follows:
Religion: Moses the great lawgiver, holding the Tables of the Law, given at Mount Sinai, by Charles Henry Niehaus; St. Paul, with sword and scroll, by John Donoghue.
Commerce: Christopher Columbus, by Paul Bartlett; Robert Fulton, holding a model of his first steamboat, Clermont, by Lewis Potter.
History: Herodotus, the “Father of History,” by Daniel Chester French; Edward Gibbon, author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by C. H. Niehaus.
Art: Michelangelo, by Paul Bartlett; Beethoven, by Theodor Bauer.
Philosophy: Plato, by John J. Boyle; Francis Bacon, by John J. Boyle.
Poetry: Homer, by Augustus Saint-Gaudens; Shakespeare, by Frederick W. MacMonnies.
Law: Solon, by F. Wellington Ruckstuhl; James Kent, by George E. Bissell.
Science: Newton, by Cyrus E. Dallin; Joseph Henry, by Herbert Adams.
Numerous paintings, mosaics, and inscriptions adorn the interior walls. The dark Tennessee, the red Numidia, and the shades of yellow Sienna marble give the room a rich color effect.
When the collection of a million books was moved from the crowded Capitol it was believed that the increase for the next hundred years had been amply provided for; but before 15 years had passed it had been found necessary to roof over one of the four great open courts (more than a quarter of an acre in extent) and fill it with a 10-story steel bookstack to hold 1,500,000 volumes. By 1927 another court had been filled with a 14-story stack. Two years later four levels were added to the first of these court stacks, making the two equal.
To meet the great increase in the future, Congress appropriated for the purchase of a square and a half of land to the eastward and the construction of an annex building costing $9,300,000. To the annex will be transferred the copyright office, card division, printery, and bindery, but leaving room in it for eight or ten million volumes of less active material, such, for example, as the 97,000 volumes of bound newspapers. There are 20 acres of floor space in the new building.
The Library’s resources for research are unsurpassed in the Western Hemisphere; its service as a national library is unexcelled. The printed book collection on June 30, 1938, totaled 5,591,000, surpassed in numbers only by that of the Bibliothèque National in Paris, and increasing at a greater rate than those in any other library. Last year 196,000 volumes were added.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ADDITION
Founded in 1800 by an act appropriating $5,000 for the purchase of “books for the use of both Houses of Congress,” the Library continued, down to the midpoint of its 139 years of history, to be no more than its name implies—a collection for the use of the National Legislature. By 1865 the Library had attained a growth of 82,000 volumes, which was notable among American libraries neither in size nor in service rendered.
The collections include the library of Thomas Jefferson (6,760 volumes, the nucleus of the present collections, purchased for $23,950 in 1815), the Peter Force and the Toner collections of American history, the Smithsonian Institution’s unequaled collection of the proceedings of learned societies of the world, the Yudin collection of Russian books (with later additions probably the largest outside of Russia), the collection of John Boyd Thacher (fifteenth-century books, and books on the French Revolution, early Americana, autographs of European notables), the Schiff-Deinard collection of Hebrew literature, and 130,000 Chinese books, understood to be one of the largest and best-organized collections outside the Orient. Most notable among recent accessions is the Vollbehr collection of 3,000 fifteenth-century books (incunabula), for whose purchase Congress appropriated $1,500,000 in July, 1930. The gem of this group is the Gutenberg Bible, one of the three extant perfect copies on vellum of the first great book printed in Europe from movable type (A. D. 1450-1455).
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS—READING ROOM
Manuscripts relating chiefly to American history are among the Library’s greatest treasures. The reproducing by photography of manuscript materials for American history in foreign archives and libraries, which since 1927 has formed so significant a portion of the division’s work, has added more than 2,000,000 pages to the resources which students of that history can use in Washington without going to Europe.
Chief among originals beyond all price are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States—both added in 1921—the personal papers of President Washington, many Presidents, and other statesmen.
The Library is rich in music. This collection numbers over 1,194,000 pieces and volumes, surpassed only in two or three European libraries. An auditorium of 500 seats, given and richly endowed by Mrs. Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, provides free concerts and lectures.
Other notable groups are 1,400,000 maps and views; 542,000 engravings and other pictorial reproductions, including the splendid Pennell collections; the law library (404,000 volumes). The social and political sciences are represented by 890,500 volumes, language and literature by 350,000, history by 420,000, and pure science by 265,500.
The most recent important development in service is the division of aeronautics, established through a benefaction of $140,000 from the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for Aeronautics, now supplemented by an annual congressional appropriation.
Special facilities for serious research include some 50 individual study rooms and (elsewhere) 125 special desks or tables. Interlibrary loans for investigators whose work is likely to advance the boundaries of knowledge are sent far and wide through the United States and some abroad.
There is a service for blind readers which last year loaned 42,000 volumes in embossed type to some 3,000 readers in the United States.
Printed catalogue cards, numbering 110,000,000, prepared by the Library for its own catalogues, are sold at cost to some 6,300 other libraries, effecting for the subscribers prodigious savings in their cataloguing bills but yielding a revenue to the Treasury of $328,405.
Until very recently Congress alone provided the funds to meet all the Library’s expenses, excepting one gift of $20,000 received in 1904. But in 1925 the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board was created by Congress, the Secretary of the Treasury and the Librarian of Congress being ex officio chairman and secretary of the board, respectively. The act authorized the board to receive and invest funds for permanent endowments, and the Librarian to receive gifts of money for immediate disbursement. Already endowments aggregating about $2,000,000 and gift funds of $1,415,000 for immediate expenditure have been received and have yielded an income from 1925 to 1938 of $726,000. These new resources add to the bibliographic apparatus and support a project for developing an archive of American folk song. One endowment yields $4,000 per year for the purchase of recent Hispanic literature and employs a consultant to suggest items for purchase in this particular field.
THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE AND THE CONSTITUTION
Six consultants, men of professional rank and experience, are engaged (without any administrative duties) in advising the maturer users of the Library in their investigations. This unique service is to be found nowhere else in libraries.
Notable among gifts are those of John D. Rockefeller, jr.—one of $450,000 for the acquisition in facsimile copies of source material for American history existing in the archives of foreign countries, and another of $250,000 for the development of a great union catalogue of important books in other American libraries.
The scheme of classification, covering 5,000 printed pages, has been adopted in 80 large libraries in America and Europe.
Herbert Putnam, the Librarian, took office on April 5, 1899.
The Library staff, organized in 30 divisions, consists of 1,055 persons, of whom 585 are doing library work proper; 136 handle the copyright business, which since 1870 has been under direction of the Librarian; 204 constitute the building force, which guards the building day and night, keeps it in beautiful order, attends to heating, lighting, and ventilating the 15 acres of floor space, vacuum cleans—the year round—the 162 miles of books, and looks after the countless other mechanical matters. The remainder (111 persons) are printers and bookbinders engaged on Library work, but under the Public Printer’s direction; 19 are engaged on special projects.