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.