The Great Library Turns 225

Spending time in one of Washington's greatest treasures––with Superman

This summer I had the privilege to be a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Library of Congress’ John W. Kluge Center. Despite living in the Washington area for several decades, I had only occasionally visited the Library, and had never used it for research. While it should have been obvious, I was overwhelmed at the unparalleled richness of the Library’s holdings and its role as a center of intellectual study.

(Thomas Jefferson Building, with John Adams Building behind and corner of the James Madison Building to the right. Image from Britannica.)

This year, the Library turned 225 years old. Beginning as a small collection of volumes on law and legislation for Members of Congress, it is now without question the largest and greatest library in the world. With its dozens of organized centers and the Kluge Center for Scholars, it must be the closest approximation to the legendary Library of Alexandria and its Mouseion that we can experience, and indeed, I venture to say, it probably surpasses whatever those ancient Greco-Romano-Egyptians came up with.

A decent amount of what the Library holds is available online, but with over 178 million items (only 25 million of which are books) only a fraction of the total holdings are digitized. As I quickly learned, nothing can substitute for walking through the Library’s three buildings themselves, an endless labyrinth of corridors, numberless rooms, breathtaking architecture and decorative features, and a wonderfully energizing bustle of people all day long, staffers, researchers, and visitors alike.

For the Library’s 225th, the scholar Jane Aikin published a comprehensive, sometimes dizzying, history. I recently reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal (firewalled, but hopefully some of you have subscriptions). Aikin heroically tackles the Library’s complex institutional development, but also questions of how the Library fit into the larger national culture. Other outstanding histories by John Y. Cole, longtime historian of the Library, and David C. Mearns (who wrote in the 1940s) are also very worthwhile.

Aikin ably covers many of the personalities who made the Library what it is. The legendary Ainsworth Rand Spofford, Librarian from the Civil War to nearly the turn of the 20th century; Herbert Putnam, who brought the Declaration of Independence to the Library in 1921 and served as Librarian for 40 years; and Archibald MacLeish, who sent the Declaration away for safekeeping in World War II, get a good amount of attention in Aikin’s history, but other larger-than-life figures are fascinating characters throughout the Library’s existence. My distant cousin David Haykin, who gets a mention in Aikin’s book, worked at the Library for over a quarter of a century, and became Chief of the Subject Cataloging Division for a dozen years, essentially helping create the modern cataloging and classification practices used by libraries around the world, including the ubiquitous Library of Congress classification system.

No history, however, can replicate the experience of spending an extended period of time in the Library, starting with the magnificent Main Reading Room.

(Visitors (not researchers) in the Main Reading Room. Image from Library of Congress.)

Though sadly largely empty of researchers these days, thanks to the internet and online library collections, the Main Reading Room is without question the greatest room in the National Capital, possibly the country. I’m sure it sounds pedantic, but I’ve never been in surroundings that more embody the old cliche “the life of the mind.” I can’t imagine that any monastery or college courtyard more physically wrenches you from the daily grind and propels you toward an encounter with the best that has been thought and said. Yes, the wooden seats aren’t the most comfortable, and the desk lamps impede one’s view of the room, but with its statues of famous thinkers of the past, inscriptions from the various intellectual disciplines, stained glass windows high up of the seals of the States, the marble columns and arches, and the tens of thousands of open stacks reference books, it is as close as one can come to scholarly heaven on earth.

But the Main Reading Room, though the spiritual center of the Library, is just the beginning. There are subject matter reading rooms spread throughout all three main buildings, from the American Folklife Center in the basement of the main Jefferson Building, to the Science and Business Reading Room, in the overlooked Adams Building, which is a magnificent Art Deco room originally dedicated to Thomas Jefferson and filled with murals and quotes from the drafter of the Declaration of Independence. The Manuscript Division (in the massive Madison Building) holds 78 million items alone, and it and the Rare Book and Special Collections Division are a veritable treasure storehouse. Then there are the Recorded Sound and Moving Picture divisions, Prints and Photographs, Newspapers and Periodicals divisions, the restoration and preservation laboratories, and on and on. And almost everything, unless truly fragile or priceless, can be requested to read, watch, or listen.

In addition to the well-known Gutenberg Bible just off the Great Hall in the Jefferson Building, the Library holds a new Treasures Gallery made possible by a donation from David Rubenstein, the full-size Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Auditorium (where I heard two great bluegrass concerts this summer), the Mary Pickford movie theater, a gigantic relief globe outside the Map Collection, the U.S. Copyright Office, a collection of Oscars from Marvin Hamlisch, a room of Stradivarius violins, George Gershwin’s piano, and Sergei Rachmaninoff’s intricately-inlaid desk, among other treasures.

(My muse while researching at the Library this summer, a mural from the Great Hall; photo by author.)

I was supposed to be researching National Treasure this summer (and I did, honestly!, if Kevin Butterfield, the excellent director of the Kluge Center, is reading this…) but I spent as much time wandering through the rooms and corridors as I did in my office. And that’s not even to mention the tunnels that connect the buildings, in which is one of D.C.’s best coffee shops, and the Machine, Carpentry, and Mason Shops. It’s a city within a city.

And, at the risk of geeking-out entirely, I’m particularly grateful to Megan Halsband for indulging my childhood passion for:

(You’d have a goofy look on your face, too, if you held this in your hands.)

Yes, that’s an actual Superman No. 1. Some of you may have read that just last month, the same issue sold for $9 million at auction, and this copy was probably not that far in quality from that record-breaker. And, Megan pulled out Batman No. 1, Amazing Fantasy No. 15, and others from the Library’s collection of 165,000 comics (after I came to, I told Megan that I would love to help the Library get copies of Action Comics No. 1 and Detective Comics No. 27, so if any readers just happen to have those and would like to donate them to the Nation, please get in touch).

As I mentioned in my review of Aikin’s history, the Library has not escaped the mundane world of politics. Overseen by Congress, with the Librarian appointed by the president, the Library has often been a site of political battles. Congress has pressured the Librarian throughout the institution’s history, outside forces (such as the American Library Association) have tried to influence the selection of the Librarian, and earlier this year, President Trump dismissed Librarian Carla Hayden. The Library is, in this respect, like every other institution in the Capital.

Perhaps the Library is also like other parts of government in the dedication of its employees. I have to say, however, that I was not prepared for the passion of the staff for their jobs and their fierce loyalty to the Library as an institution. Many have been at the Library for decades. The reference staff is filled with experts, many holding PhDs, who have an incredible command of the materials under their supervision. I didn’t get every question answered, but I definitely received help on all, and in most cases was given access to everything I requested (except, most disappointingly, for the Library’s top treasure: Thomas Jefferson’s handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence; I hope that will go on display for the 250th next year).

As I said in my WSJ review, the Library of Congress is perhaps the supreme achievement of intellectual institution building in America. No doubt many will quibble with that assertion, suggesting the Smithsonian, Harvard, the California university system, or other renowned organizations as equal or superior. Perhaps they’re right. But for sheer power of impression, I’m willing to bet a few dollars that nothing can beat the Library. And if you go in the doors and experience as much as you can, and then perhaps actually start using it, I hope you feel like I did this summer. Even if you don’t get to see Superman No. 1.