Jefferson: Librarian-in-Chief

Few public figures’ lives are so entwined with “library” as is Thomas Jefferson’s, but his library story stands in shadow amidst so many other well-known and almost mythical accomplishments, driven by this sentiment: “It can never be too often repeated, that the time for fixing every essential right on a legal basis is while our rulers are honest, and ourselves united.” It is, however, fair to say that the sentiment and the many better known accomplishments were informed and shaped by the Jefferson library story itself. Dumas Malone, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia at retirement in 1962, wrote about all of this in his six-volume, Pulitzer Prize-winning Jefferson and His Time. The book set is available in the WLN collection if you want a tho…