—Thomas Jefferson
Happy National Read a Book Day!
There was no National Read a Book Day in Jefferson’s time (the event seems to have been started sometime in the early 2000s in America—probably by a librarian) but had there been one in 1776, he would undoubtedly have endorsed it. Jefferson was both an inveterate reader and an equally determined book collector—as we shall see below.
Jefferson didn’t need the New York Times to tell him, as in a recent, August 29 wellness column, that research suggests reading can help keep your memory sharp, and help you sleep better. Moreover, reading fiction can increase empathy and improve well-being. And he would have been both shocked and disappointed to learn from that same column that a recent study revealed the number of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell by 40% over the last two decades.
I’m like Thomas Jefferson. I simply cannot live without books. I cannot remember the last time I was not reading a book. The worlds they explore and explain are endlessly fascinating. And I would be remiss, when discussing the joys of reading, if I did not take this opportunity to nominate my ten favorites, in both fiction and nonfiction. The choices are invariably somewhat arbitrary, as most of the next ten on my list could just as easily have been on my top ten as well.
Here they are:
Nonfiction:
- Nansen, From Day to Day [What did you expect?]
- The Oxford History of the U.S. (Vols. 4, 5, 6, 7, 9)
- Shirer, 20th Century Journey (Vol. I & II)
- Boorstin, The Americans (Vol. II & III)
- McCourt, Angela’s Ashes
- Manchester, Churchill (Vol. I & II)
- Griffith, In Defense of the Public Liberty
- Hastings, Retribution
- Troyat, Tolstoy
- Harari, Sapiens
Fiction:
- Tolkien, Lord of the Rings Trilogy
- Nordhoff and Hall, Mutiny on the Bounty Trilogy
- Wouk, War and Remembrance
- Jerome, Three Men in a Boat
- Wolfe, A Man in Full
- Heller, Catch-22
- Twain, Huckleberry Finn
- O’Connor, The Last Hurrah
- Conroy, The Prince of Tides
- Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War
What are some of your favorites?
Now, back to Thomas Jefferson.
When Jeffereson’s birthplace and first family home, the Shadwell Plantation, which he inherited from his father in 1764, burned to the ground in 1770, Jefferson most lamented the loss of his approximately 200 books. Following the fire, he moved into the new home he was still constructing just outside Charlottesville, VA, soon to be known as Monticello. Undaunted, Jefferson began building yet another library. According to biographer Fawn Brodie, within three years he had accumulated another 1,250 books (or an average of almost one book per day).
And Jefferson read what he bought. Having a self-described “canine appetite for reading,” he designed a revolving bookstand that could accommodate five open books at once, which he kept on his desk, allowing him to simultaneously compare and contrast several works. He even developed a preferred daily reading routine: sciences, religion and ethics in the early morning, history and politics in midday, and fine arts, oratory, and rhetoric after dark.
When Jefferson learned, in 1814, that the British, as part of the War of 1812, had burned both the Capitol and the Library of Congress, with its 3,000 volumes, he offered, at age 72, to sell his latest collection, numbering 6,487 volumes and constituting the largest personal collection of books in the United States, for any price set by Congress. [It agreed to pay him $29,950, less than half its auction value, according to Brodie.]
But even then, neither Jefferson’s acquisitive desires (nor his book troubles) were at an end. His next, and final, book collection (of approximately 2,000 volumes) was sold at auction in 1829, following his death, to help satisfy his considerable debts.
And what of his generous sale to the Library of Congress? Nearly two-thirds of that collection were destroyed by a fire at the Library of Congress on Christmas Eve, 1851.
Despite this setback, the Library of Congress has prospered over the years. As of 2022, it boasted a collection of over 175 million items, making it the largest library in the world.
I’ll leave the last word to Alan Jacobs, professor of humanities at Baylor University, and author of The Pleasure of Reading in an Age of Distraction. “Libraries [and bookstores I might add] are great places to find things that no algorithm would ever suggest to you,” he writes. “Libraries are serendipity vendors.”
I’m sure Jefferson would agree with that!
