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With an ever-expanding catalogue of more than 171 million items occupying 838 miles of bookshelves, the Library of Congress is the largest library on the planet as measured by collection size. Its prodigious holdings include more than 40 million books and other print materials, 74 million manuscripts, and the largest collection of rare books in North America. Old King Cole, which is about a millimeter tall (tinier than a grain of rice), is the library’s smallest book, while a 5-by-7-foot collection of photos of Bhutan is the largest.
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It's a factFounded in 1800, the library predates every other federal cultural institution in the U.S. — it's so old, in fact, that it was brought into existence by the same bill that relocated the capital to Washington, D.C., from Philadelphia.
The library doesn't just house printed materials, of course. It contains everything from the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated to hundreds of billions of tweets and Amelia Earhart’s palm print. The British Library and its massive catalogue is next on the list of the world’s largest libraries, with the top five rounded out by the New York Public Library, Library and Archives Canada, and the Russian State Library.
Numbers Don't Lie
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The Library of Congress was first proposed by ______.
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The Library of Congress was first proposed by James Madison.
The original library was burned down in the War of 1812.
The Library of Congress was comparatively tiny for the first 14 years of its existence, but that didn’t make it any less tragic when its collection of 3,000 books was destroyed along with the Capitol building on August 24, 1814. The conflagration that took it down, part of the War of 1812, necessitated a new location. Enter Thomas Jefferson, who offered his own collection of 6,487 books (then the largest personal library in the nation) as a replacement for the lost volumes. Though he didn’t do so for free — Congress paid him $23,950 — Jefferson did provide the foundation for what the library would eventually become. Sadly, a second fire destroyed most of his contribution as well as nearly two-thirds of the entire collection on Christmas Eve 1851, but the institution rose from the ashes once again.
Michael Nordine is a writer and editor living in Denver. A native Angeleno, he has two cats and wishes he had more.
