Library of Congress

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 24th of April 1800, John Adams signed an act of Congress that set aside $5,000 for books, and a national institution began with a few crates ordered from London. That first shipment held 740 books and three maps, tucked into the new United States Capitol. Today the Library of Congress holds roughly 173 million items in more than 470 languages, staffed by over 3,000 people across buildings on Capitol Hill and beyond. How does a small reading room for legislators become the de facto national library of the United States, and the oldest federal cultural institution in the country? What does it mean for a library to be open to anyone yet lend its books to almost no one? And why, in 2025, did a sitting president fire its head by email, without explanation, on a quiet spring day? The answers run through fire, a former president's private books, a copyright loophole that floods its loading docks daily, and a fight over whether this place belongs to Congress or to the people.

• 2. Fire And Jefferson

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  In August 1814, British forces occupied Washington and burned several federal buildings in retaliation for American destruction in Canada. More than 3,000 volumes of the library went up in flames in the Senate wing of the Capitol. One government account book from 1810 survived; British Admiral George Cockburn carried it off as a souvenir, and his family returned it to the United States in 1940. Within a month of the fire, Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his own large personal library as a replacement. He had rebuilt that collection after losing part of it to an earlier fire of his own. Congress accepted in January 1815, appropriating $23,950 for his 6,487 books, though New Hampshire representative Daniel Webster and others wanted to exclude works of an atheistical, irreligious, and immoral tendency. Jefferson's library had been gathered over 50 years and spanned subjects far beyond what a legislature might expect. He defended that breadth in his own words: "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." He organized the books on Francis Bacon's scheme of Memory, Reason, and Imagination, with 44 subdivisions. On the 24th of December 1851, the largest fire in the library's history destroyed 35,000 books, two-thirds of the collection and two-thirds of Jefferson's original transfer. Congress put up $168,700 to replace what was lost but nothing to acquire new material. By 2008, librarians had found replacements for all but 300 of the works documented in Jefferson's original collection.

• 3. The Spofford Engine

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  Ainsworth Rand Spofford directed the library from 1865 to 1897 and turned a struggling reading room into a national resource. He had arrived as an assistant under John G. Stephenson, the physician whom Abraham Lincoln appointed in 1861 in what is regarded as the most political appointment to the post. Stephenson left Washington three weeks into the job to serve as a volunteer aide-de-camp at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg, and Spofford ran the library in his absence. Spofford began comprehensively collecting Americana and American literature, and he absorbed the libraries of the Smithsonian and of historian Peter Force. In 1870, all copyright registration and deposit activity was placed under the library's control, a change that would reshape its growth for the next century. By 1876 the library held 300,000 volumes, tied with the Boston Public Library as the nation's largest. When it moved out of the Capitol in 1897, it carried more than 840,000 volumes, 40 percent of them acquired through copyright deposit. A year before that move, the Joint Library Committee held hearings, and Spofford with six experts from the American Library Association argued the library should become a true national institution. Congress more than doubled the staff, from 42 to 108 persons, with senators Justin Morrill of Vermont and Daniel W. Voorhees of Indiana lending support. In 1893, Elizabeth Dwyer became the first woman appointed to the library's staff.

• 4. The Collector's Forty Years

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  Herbert Putnam held the office for forty years, from 1899 to 1939, longer than anyone before or since. Two years into his term the library became the first in the United States to hold one million volumes. Putnam introduced the Library of Congress Classification, a scheme now applied to over 138 million items, and he instituted the interlibrary loan service that made the institution what he called a "library of last resort." In 1903 he persuaded Theodore Roosevelt to use an executive order moving the papers of the Founding Fathers from the State Department into the library. His appetite for foreign material was enormous: a 4,000-volume library of Indica in 1904, G. V. Yudin's 80,000-volume Russian library in 1906, the Schatz collection of early opera librettos in 1908, and in the early 1930s the Russian Imperial Collection of 2,600 volumes from the Romanov family. In 1929, Congressman Ross Collins of Mississippi won approval for the library to buy Otto Vollbehr's collection of incunabula for $1.5 million, which included one of three remaining perfect vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible. Putnam established the Legislative Reference Service in 1914 to answer congressional research questions, and a 1925 act let the library accept donations and endowments. Gertrude Clarke Whittall gave five Stradivarius violins, and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge funded a concert hall inside the building. From these gifts came chairs and consultantships, the best known being the Poet Laureate Consultant.

• 5. National Or Legislative

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  Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed the poet Archibald MacLeish in 1939, and he became the most widely known librarian of Congress in the institution's history. Serving through the height of World War II until 1944, MacLeish urged librarians to oppose totalitarianism on behalf of democracy. He set up a "democracy alcove" in the Main Reading Room for the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and The Federalist Papers, and during the war those founding documents were stored in Fort Knox for safekeeping. The library even researched weather data on the Himalayas for Air Force pilots. The question of whether the library served Congress or the nation reached its sharpest point under Lawrence Quincy Mumford, who led from 1953 to 1974. Senator Claiborne Pell asked Douglas Bryant of Harvard University Library to assess operations, and Bryant proposed reforms emphasizing the federal role over the legislative one. He even suggested renaming the institution, which Mumford rebuked as "unspeakable violence to tradition." The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 settled the matter for a time, renewing the library's focus on research for Congress and renaming the Legislative Reference Service as the Congressional Research Service. Harry Truman's appointee Luther H. Evans, who served until 1953, had pulled the institution outward through Library of Congress Missions: the San Francisco mission aided the meeting that established the United Nations, and the Japan mission helped create the National Diet Library.

• 6. Champagne Out Of The Bottle

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  James H. Billington, nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1987 and confirmed unanimously, set out to "get the champagne out of the bottle." Over his tenure the library's analog collections doubled, from 85.5 million items in 1987 to more than 160 million by 2014. American Memory began in 1990 and became the National Digital Library in 1994, offering free online access to digitized American history. The Kluge Center started in 2000 with a $60 million grant from John W. Kluge, and awards the Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity, now worth $1.5 million, the first Nobel-level prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities and social sciences. The National Book Festival, founded in 2001 with First Lady Laura Bush, has drawn more than 1,000 authors and a million guests. The Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, launched in 2007, has gone to Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, Carole King, Billy Joel, and Willie Nelson. Billington's library also acquired the only copy of the 1507 Waldseemüller world map, called "America's birth certificate," in 2003, now on permanent display in the Thomas Jefferson Building. He raised more than half a billion dollars in private support even as staffing fell by 30 percent. Before retiring in 2015 after 28 years, he came under pressure following a Government Accountability Office report that faulted a "work environment lacking central oversight" and his refusal to hire a chief information officer as required by law.

• 7. A Firing By Email

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  Carla D. Hayden was sworn in as the fourteenth librarian of Congress on the 14th of September 2016, appointed by Barack Obama. She was the first professional librarian in the role since 1974, holding a Ph.D. in library science from the University of Chicago, and the first woman and first African American to hold the position. She had led the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore from 1993 to 2016 and served as president of the American Library Association from 2003 to 2004. She pushed digitization and rural access, and the Association of Research Libraries credited her with making the institution "more open, accessible, and celebrated" while reaffirming its role as "the people's library." On the 14th of February 2023, she announced a $2.5 million five-year grant from the Lilly Endowment to fund programs on religious cultures in Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, including a book and film about Omar ibn Said. Then, on the 8th of May 2025, two days after she testified before Senate and House committees, she was fired by President Trump via email and without explanation. Publishers Weekly called it the "latest blow to professional research and the literary and arts community." No replacement has been nominated. Principal Deputy Librarian Robert Newlen, who would have served as interim, was also fired, and Trump named Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche as acting librarian. Copyright office director Perlmutter has sued to dispute the legality of the dismissals, since the register is appointed by and responsible to the librarian of Congress.

• 8. What The Stacks Hold

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  Nearly 15,000 newly published items arrive at the library every business day, the product of a rule called mandatory deposit. All publishers must submit two complete copies of their published works, whether or not they register copyright, because the institution serves as the base for the United States Copyright Office. The library does not keep everything; it adds an average of 12,000 items per day, while rejected works are traded with other libraries, sent to federal agencies, or donated to schools and communities. That deposit requirement was itself challenged in Valancourt Books v. Garland, where a court found that forcing a publisher to deposit copies violated the Takings Clause. The catalogued holdings run past 32 million books and print materials in 470 languages, more than 61 million manuscripts, 5.3 million maps, 6 million works of sheet music, 3 million sound recordings, and more than 14.7 million prints and photographs. The rare book collection, the largest in North America, holds the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, a Gutenberg Bible originating from the Saint Blaise Abbey in the Black Forest, the Betts Stradivarius, and the Cassavetti Stradivarius. The shelving stretches about 838 miles. Digitization, funded at $6 to 8 million a year, cannot keep pace with all of it; the digitized items represent less than 10 percent of the roughly 160-million-item collection. The library has chosen not to join Google Books or the Digital Public Library of America, though it has supported the Internet Archive, leaving open the question of how much of this vast record the public will ever see on a screen.