Jefferson and the LOC

It was on this day in 1815 that the U.S. Congress accepted Thomas Jefferson's offer to rebuild the Library of Congress with more than 6,000 books from his own library. The Library of Congress had been established in 1800 as a research library for congressional members, and it was located in the Capitol building. But in August of 1814, British troops had burned much of Washington, D.C., and the library had been destroyed.
At that time, Thomas Jefferson owned the largest private collection of books in the United States. He'd been a lifelong booklover and collector. He loved books so much that he gave up reading the newspaper so that he'd have more time to read the great philosophers, and he said, "I am much the happier."
Within a month of hearing the news that the Library of Congress had been destroyed, Jefferson offered his own library as a replacement. Congress eventually agreed to purchase Jefferson's library for $23,950.
Today, the Library of Congress has grown into the largest library in the world, with more than 130 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 29 million books and other printed materials, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 58 million manuscripts.
Some of the books that belonged to Thomas Jefferson were destroyed in a fire in 1851, but many still remain in the library. When the first Muslim member of Congress, Rep. Keith Ellison, was sworn in a few weeks ago, he took the oath of office by laying his hand on a copy of the Quran that had originally belonged to Jefferson.