On April 24, 1800, President John Adams signed a law setting aside $5,000 to buy books for the brand-new United States Congress. The plan was simple - give lawmakers a reference collection to help them write laws. They ordered 740 books and 3 maps from London. The shipment arrived in 1801, and the Library of Congress was officially open for business, tucked into a corner of the U.S. Capitol building.
Things nearly ended in 1814, when British soldiers burned Washington, D.C. during the War of 1812 and destroyed the entire library. Former president Thomas Jefferson rode to the rescue. He offered to sell Congress his own personal library - 6,487 books on every subject from philosophy to cooking, gathered over 50 years. Congress accepted, paying him $23,950, and Jefferson's books became the new foundation of the library.
Today the Library of Congress holds more than 175 million items, making it the largest library in the world. Its three giant buildings on Capitol Hill house everything from a perfect copy of the Gutenberg Bible to Abraham Lincoln's handwritten Gettysburg Address to the world's smallest book - a tiny edition of the Pied Piper that fits on a penny. Every published book in the U.S. gets a copy sent to the Library, and anyone over 16 can walk in and read. What started as 740 books for lawmakers has become a living memory of a whole country.
