A note of interest. The United States Library of Congress, those clever cutting-edge librarians in Washington DC, have just made available the catalog for Thomas Jefferson’s Library online. While the books themselves are rare, and not available for online browsing, they are linked to the LoC card catalog, which gives full descriptions of each. Still, it’s interesting to thumb through the categories, and titles like “Experiments and observations on electricity, made at Philadelphia in America” by Benjamin Franklin, “The History of Chess, together with short and plain instructions any one may easily play at it without the help of a teacher” by Robert Lambe, and “Hermes or A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar” by James Harris, Esq., to discover the kind of works that made our third President tick.
