Image Courtesy of Washington University
For 131 years, the books sat quietly at Washington University. Then two scholars put together enough pieces to realize they’d just found 74 books from Thomas Jefferson’s personal library.
In 1815, after the U.S. capital burned, Jefferson sold his books to the Library of Congress for a song. The nation had to have books. Bereft, he started buying again. But when he died, 11 years later, those books had to be auctioned off to pay debts he’d stacked up running Monticello. The family bought some back, and later donated them to Wash. U.—without mentioning their provenance.
“At the lower right-hand part of a page, he wrote his initials,” says David Konig, professor of history and law. “He used block letters in the later part of his life, cursive earlier.” The switch couldn’t have been coincidental? “Oh no, no, he was too methodical for that.”
Konig, who’s writing a bio of Jefferson, immediately recognized the penmanship on a note stuck in Plutarch’s Lives—even though it was written in Greek. “One book has a typographical error in the table of contents,” says Konig, “and he scratches out the attribution to Palladio and writes in Chambray. He made corrections all over the place.”
