Today, when the Library of Congress serves a large and diverse nation as its national library, it may be hard to recall a time when that institution was just what its name implied, and no more: Congress's library. In 1815, the year the bookplate on the cover of this issue was printed, the Library of Congress consisted of a little more than six thousand volumes, nearly all of which were newly purchased from Thomas Jefferson, after the British had burned the Capitol in 1814, destroying the previous collection.

            Congress had always had a library available for consultation, even before the move to the newly established capital city on the Potomac river in 1800. The Library Company of Philadelphia and the New York Society Library had made their facilities available to the lawmakers when they convened in those cities. Part of the act legislating the federal government's final move provided $5,000 to buy books and library furnishings for Congress, and in the year of the move an order went off to London for 152 works in 740 volumes, most of which dealt with political, historical, or legal subjects. In 1802 another law provided for the hiring of a librarian, at $2 a day when his attendance was required.

            The present bookplate, shown here actual size, is not the first one extant. In one of the few volumes which somehow escaped the 1814 conflagration there is a plate very similar in style, except for the absence of the inner box and designation of country. One hastens to add that the number "1" appearing on the present specimen is not an accession number! It is instead the shelf location designation for the particular class to which the book belonged. The number for the class itself was not normally recorded on the plate; apparently it was obvious from the title of the book. It was, however, shown in the printed catalog. The classification scheme in use at the time was based, not surprisingly, on the one used by Jefferson, who had in turn made use of the ideas of Francis Bacon and others. Jefferson's system provided for forty-four subject classifications, or "chapters."

            Records of the printing of the 1815 plate fortunately survive. From them we learn that William Elliot, a printer who had come to the District of Columbia in 1813, printed 11,100 of the plates, for which he charged $.50 per hundred, or $55.50 in all. The plate, perhaps more properly called a label because of its size and method of production, was printed entirely by letterpress, using type, piece border, and rule. Printed labels of this type had been common for some time, and must have been less expensive to produce than the engraved variety. Undoubtedly the plate was set up several times, so that each pass through the press would produce that number of plates. The presence of minor typographical variants, in this plate as well as other versions, virtually confirms what would for a printer be a logical procedure. Subsequently printed plates show variations in such elements as size, typeface, and corner pieces, and were probably also printed by Elliot. Such plates were in use at the Library of Congress at least through the 1820s.

            The original of this plate was provided through the courtesy of The Jenkins Company, Austin, Texas.

Phillip A. Metzger

Graduate School of Library Science

The University of Texas at Austin

[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 14, no. 1 (Winter 1979): 84-85.]