Mind-boggling, awe-inspiring legacy of a bibliophile president

From Thomas Jefferson’s original bequest of 6,000 books the Library of Congress has grown into a vast cultural institution

“I CANNOT live without books,” Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, said in 1815. Jefferson spoke three languages, read two others and was teaching himself Arabic when he died.

The Library of Congress, established in 1800, is the oldest cultural institution in the US. When British royal marines sacked it during the war of 1812, Jefferson offered his own collection of 6,487 books to replace the volumes destroyed by perfidious Albion. Jefferson’s collection was transported on 18 ox-drawn carts from Monticello.

The donation created a controversy: congressmen didn’t understand why a legislative library need include books in foreign languages, or volumes on philosophy, science and literature. “There is in fact, no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer,” Jefferson replied.

Last year, the library’s Congressional Research Service completed 871,287 research assignments for members of Congress, who have the library’s vast resources at their disposal 24/7.

From the Thomas Jefferson Building, the awe-inspiring heart of the library, directly east of the Capitol, you can see the light burning in the lantern of the Capitol dome when Congress is in session. Congressmen cross the street to use the members' room, replete with dark oak panelling, two Carrara marble fireplaces, gilt torchèresand frescoes to the glory of industry, peace, and truth.

The fountain of Neptune stands outside the library’s three-tonne bronze doors, “to defend the building from murky, irrational thought”, says Laura Belman, the docent who shows me the library’s treasures. The classical allegory continues inside the first gallery, with multiple statues of Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom and human understanding. She is alternately portrayed as Minerva of war and Minerva of peace: like Barack Obama in his Nobel lecture, 19th-century library builders couldn’t seem to choose between the two.

As we make our way through this grandiose accumulation of marble, stucco, stained glass, mosaic and 23-carat gold leaf, Belman’s lecture is dotted with mind-boggling numbers: 143 million items in the library’s collection; 650 miles of bookshelves; 22,000 new items received daily, of which 10,000 are kept.

The competition between the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France is palpable. The BNF has the world's oldest book, an Egyptian hieroglyph. "Every once and a while, a tourist tells us they've just been to the British Library and were told itwas the world's biggest library, with 150 million items," Belman scoffs. But the British are cheating. "They include eight million stamps, and more than 49 million patents" – not counted by the Library of Congress.

To visit the Library of Congress is to appreciate how Euro- and male-centric American civilisation has been until now. In the south corridor, for example, the names of American poets, from Longfellow to Edgar Alan Poe, are wreathed in mosaic on one side of the vaulted ceiling; the ancients and Europeans – Theocritus, Ronsard, Browning, Heine, Musset and Hugo – are on the other.

The sun always rises over the magnificent main reading room, with its 160ft-high ceiling and allegorical statues of women representing religion, art and history. But when it comes to specific achievement, the 16 bronze statues are all men, including Moses, St Paul, Michelangelo, Beethoven, Shakespeare and Isaac Newton.

There’s something touching about the Obama memorabilia on display in the library’s Middle East and North Africa reading room. The president’s planetary popularity is made manifest through Obama badges and magazine covers in African languages, photographs of Obama cafes and buses, and people wearing Obama T-shirts.

You have only to apply for a free reader’s card to occupy one of 250 mahogany desks in the main reading room. I understand why Gertrude Clarke Whittall, one of the library’s benefactors, said: “If I die and go to heaven and I don’t like it there, I’ll come back to the Library of Congress.” For a bookish soul, it’s an almost irresistible temptation. Attendance has dropped though, since the library began putting its collection online at www.loc.gov.

Irishwoman Linda Murray, now artistic director of the Irish arts group Solas Nua, treasures the year she spent curating three choreographers’ collections for the library. Murray wrote her Master’s thesis at UCC on Bronislava Nijinska, the Russian choreographer and sister of Vaslav Nijinski. “I was doing research at the library when they said, ‘Hey, you seem to know about this. Would you like to work for us?’

"The library buys all sorts of collections," Murray continues. "Often they don't know what's in the boxes." She describes the thrill of discovering a drawing of Nijinska by Jean Cocteau and the choreographer's complete notes of her own and her brother's ballets. "One day, I opened a coffee can and found an 8mm film of Nijinska's last work, Les Biches, in 1964. That was a great moment."