Archive for the ‘legacy libraries’ Category

Thursday, February 25th, 2016

Black History Month Legacy Libraries

We’re thrilled to announce our most recently completed Legacy Libraries project, the personal library of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! Dr. King’s collection of over 600 books, which currently reside at Morehouse College in Atlanta, were added to LibraryThing as a tribute to Black History Month.

Thanks to our contributing LT members for their help: JBD1 (who organized the project and broke up the library into sections for helpers), benjclark, mrmapcase, waitingtoderail, timspalding, cpirmann, AndrewB, ReneeGKC, cbl_tn, Literate.Ninja, jcbrunner, nancyewhite, SassyLassy, JoEnglish, cinaedus, katya0133, Michael.Rimmer, and amandafrench. Special thanks goes out to moonradio and seki for starting the thread back in 2008!

Come join the discussion about Dr. King’s books in this Talk thread. If you’re interested in Legacy Libraries and want to help, check out the Legacy Libraries homepage or contact the administrator, Jeremy (JBD1).

Cataloging Louis Armstrong’s Library

Next up for Legacy Libraries: the personal library of jazz trumpeter, composer, and singer, Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s library (shared with his wife, Lucille) is housed at his former home in Queens, NY. There’s still plenty of cataloging to do, and we need your help! Join the project on Talk.

More Famous Libraries

We’ve also added the personal libraries of poet Langston Hughes, and civil rights activist Rosa Parks to our Legacy Libraries ranks this month. Thanks to Jeremy for his efforts on both of these!

Labels: legacy libraries

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2016

New Legacy Library Project: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In honor of Black History Month, LibraryThing members are starting a new Legacy Library project, to catalog the personal library of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We’re welcoming everyone to join the fun in cataloging Dr. King’s books!

Legacy Libraries are the personal libraries of famous and infamous people and institutions throughout history, cataloged by LibraryThing members. Our first Legacy Library was Thomas Jefferson‘s collection, added in 2007. February being Black History Month got us investigating Dr. King’s library once again (following behind Frederick Douglass’ Legacy Library, cataloged in 2012). Since the last time we looked, better data became available, so now’s the time do do it.

Residing in his alma mater, Morehouse College in Atlanta, Dr. King’s books were saved in 2006 from being auctioned off at Sotheby’s in New York City. Archival staff at the Robert W. Woodruff Library of the Atlanta University Center processed the collection, and now LibraryThing members are working on getting these records (over 600 in total) added to our Legacy Libraries.

Check out the Talk thread or jump right to the project Wiki page to get started and claim your section of the library list. If you haven’t worked on a Legacy Library project before, this is a great introduction to them, as the sections are short! LibraryThing member and former LT staffer Jeremy is running the project and can answer any questions you have on the Talk thread.

Thanks for joining us, and have fun!

Labels: legacy libraries

Friday, August 30th, 2013

Goodbye Jeremy

Jeremy wins one.

Tim and Jeremy lose one.

Yesterday LibraryThing turned eight, and today we say goodbye to Jeremy Dibbell (jbd1), LibraryThing’s social-media guy and all-around LibraryThing soul.

After nearly three years at LibraryThing, Jeremy is moving on. Next week he begins work as Director of Communications and Outreach at Rare Book School, located at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. We’ve loaned him to Rare Book School each summer he’s worked for us. He’s looking forward to joining the team there full time.

Jeremy is a long-time and much-loved member of the team. He was an early adopter, and became LibraryThing’s official-unofficial head of the Legacy Library project long before he came to work for us formally. Most members probably know him from the newsletter, our Facebook and Twitter feeds, from member-help emails, and for his Talk posts, helping new members and laying out his vision for LibraryThing’s development.

We aren’t going to lose him completely. Jeremy will continue on for a few weeks helping us where he can and giving his successor(1) some tips. And he will continue as head of the Legacy Library project. Indeed, as he says, he’ll have more time for it now. I suspect he’ll make his views about the site known too. I doubt he could help it.

It’s not easy to summarize everything Jeremy has done for us. Some highlights include:

  • Sending 10,600 emails, not counting those that came from info@librarything.com. He saved us from drowning, and far exceeded what a run-of-the-mill “social media” manager could have done.
  • Growing the size of the Early Reviewers program from around 1,200 books/month to today’s 3,500 or 4,000/month.
  • Helping to design, troubleshooting and discussing every major new feature in the last three years.
  • Continued growth of the Legacy Libraries program (see an overview here), including the new landing page, most of the Libraries of Early America (1,500+), and a number of wonderful LL flashmobs.
  • Special events, like our edible books contests, and book spine poetry.
  • Playing Santa for SantaThings 2010 (the Book Depocalypse), 2011 and 2012.

Jeremy moved to Portland to take this job, living only a block away from my house and the office. (My wife and my son were particularly grieved to hear he was leaving.) Being in the office gave his advocacy for members and his vision for LibraryThing extra impact. He’s been at the center of every major decision–from features to hires–for some time now. He’d be harder to miss if his contribution was not more obvious in the culture he leaves behind.

Sad as we are, we’re also excited for him too. He’s been passionate about Rare Book School for years–continuing to help out there in the summer was a condition of his taking the job. Charlottesville is a beautiful place. It is also close by Monticello, where Thomas Jefferson built his library. When he left Jeremy gave my son Liam a children’s book about Monticello and Jefferson’s love of books. It is fitting that Jeremy is there now, with his Jefferson-sized library and bibliophilia.

So, from me and all the LibraryThing staff, thank you Jeremy.


1. In case you’re wondering, our social-media job is still open, but closing fast. See the job post.

Labels: employees, employment, jefferson, jeremy dibbell, jobs, legacy libraries

Tuesday, August 27th, 2013

New historical libraries in LibraryThing: Mailer, Ransome, Galileo, de Sade, Child, Dana

Another update on some Legacy Libraries folks have added recently or are working on now:

Since I wrote last we’ve had one library completion, that of author Norman Mailer. Mailer’s library is at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin, and we were able to bring it into LibraryThing by importing the MARC records. Thanks to jburlinson for adding in the records that didn’t import and for sprucing up Mailer’s profile page.

Mailer’s 851-title library contained a huge number of his own books in various editions and translations: check out his author cloud! Volunteer jburlinson commented on the author cloud “I think he would have been pleased with how it looks.”

If you have any information on additional Mailer books, &c., please let us know in the discussion thread.

Another author’s library in the works is that of Arthur Ransome, being cataloged by LTer cynfelyn. Ransom’s catalog so far includes more than 700 identified titles, with a bunch more still to be added.

My favorite collection from Ransome’s library so far is Lakes & Pirates, a list he drew up for children who enjoyed his books and were looking for other reading material.

Know of other Ransome books? Tell us in the discussion thread.

Legacy Libraries volunteer ColmGuerin is hard at work on the library of Galileo Galilei. Nearly 300 titles have been entered so far, with more to come.

Galileo’s library was collected by his student Vincenzo Viviani, and bequeathed by Viviani to the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. The books are now among the collections of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, the National Central Library in Florence. You can get a sense of the books entered so far from Galileo’s tag cloud.

As always, we’d appreciate any assistance or additional information on this library: jump into the Talk thread!

Another recent addition is the library of the Marquis de Sade, being cataloged by lolawalser from a transcription of a 1776 inventory of de Sade’s chateau, La Coste. So far a total of 295 titles have been identified and added, including a fair number of works by Rousseau, Locke, Hume, Hobbes, and Voltaire.

Speaking of Voltaire, his library still has many books to be added, so if you’re feeling adventurous (and/or have pretty good knowledge of French), join us! There’s a discussion thread where we’re working out the details, and a wiki page where you can claim a section and add some books.

We’ve started work on the library of Julia Child, a good chunk of which is now in the collections of the Schlesinger Library at Harvard. To help out with this one, please join us in the Talk thread and we’ll get you set up with some books to catalog (much easier to manage than Voltaire’s, to be sure).

Finally, on the Libraries of Early America front, I’ve been working on adding the books of Francis Dana (1743-1811), a Massachusetts lawyer and diplomat. Dana’s library is pretty neat in that it’s drawn from not only some lists of books, but also an impressive collection of receipts and order lists which document his book purchases, loans, and other things quite nicely. I’ve been a little busy what with moving and all, but I hope to finish Dana’s library off before too much longer.


How can I help? We’re always looking for volunteers to help catalog Legacy Libraries. Come join the Legacy Libraries group: introduce yourself, tell us some authors or other historical figures you’re interested in, and we’ll come up with a good Legacy project that would benefit from your help. If you know of somebody important we’re missing, let us know: if we can add their library, we will!

Labels: legacies, legacy libraries

Monday, August 12th, 2013

Seven newly-completed personal libraries: Joyce, Pym, Truman, Thackeray, Eisenhower, Marshall and Carroll

It’s been a busy few weeks for the Legacy Libraries, with a whole bunch of projects recently completed plus a number of fascinating new ones now underway (more on those later in the week). Today I’ve got a rundown of recently-finished libraries, plus a trivia question for you which I’ll answer at the end of the post: which novel is held in common between five of the seven?

James Joyce. One of the longest-running Legacy projects, James Joyce (started back in 2008 by rfb) was recently brought as near to completion as currently possible by BuiltByBooks, who added extant copies held at the Harry Ransom Center and the University of Buffalo, as well as a number of additional books identified through catalogs and other sources. The Joyce library now includes some 1,175 titles: see the author cloud or the tag mirror to get a quick sense of Joyce’s books.

More titles will be added to this library as they are identified (there are certainly lots more out there: we know that Joyce parted with some 2,000 books in Paris in 1939, and most of those have not yet been identified specifically). There’s a great deal of information about Joyce and his books on his profile page; the story makes for fascinating reading! If you have information about Joyce books not included in the LT catalog yet, please let us know in the discussion thread.

Barbara Pym. Thanks to alison_felstead, LibraryThing now includes the library catalog of British novelist Barbara Pym (author page). Pym, known for her novels Excellent Women and Quartet in Autumn (among others) was described in a 1977 article by Philip Larkin and Sir David Cecil as the most underrated writer of the twentieth century.

Pym’s 590-title library was cataloged by her sister Hilary Walton after Pym’s death in 1980, and the records are held at Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Those have been augmented in the LT catalog with information from Blackwell’s Rare Books catalogs (through which much of Pym’s library was sold in 2005).

Alison, who works at the Bodleian Library, will be speaking about the Pym Legacy Library project at the Barbara Pym Society’s annual conference at the end of this month (see the program here), so if you’re in or around Oxford, be sure and go see her presentation!

Harry Truman. Another long-running project recently completed is the library of Harry Truman, begun back in 2008 with a section of books from his home study. This summer I cleaned up the existing records and completed the cataloging of the home study collection (now numbering 833 titles), and then a number of volunteers jumped in to help out in adding books from Truman’s post-presidential working office (795 titles).

Thanks to mrmapcase, cbl_tn, Michael.Rimmer, pussreboots, Kaczencja, WillowOne and waitingtoderail for their good work on this library. If you have information about other Truman books we should add, let us know here.

Note that certain books in the Truman library (mostly in the home study collection) post-date Truman’s death, and were likely added by Bess Truman. To what extent the books listed there belonged to her is somewhat unclear, and we’re seeking additional information from the National Park Service to help us try and clarify that.

William Makepeace Thackeray. The library of author William Thackeray (known for Vanity Fair) originally intrigued BuiltByBooks during his work on the Leonard & Virginia Woolf library, which contains a volume from Thackeray’s collection. He tracked down an 1864 auction catalog of Thackeray’s books and added to LibraryThing 391 titles that were identified in the catalog. A whole bunch more listed there cannot be identified specifically, as is often the case with such sales … but Thackeray’s books were marked with a small oval stamp containing his initials, so we’re hopeful that perhaps other books will turn up.

If you have information about any additional Thackeray titles, please let us know here.

Dwight D. Eisenhower. Back in May we started a flash-mob project to catalog the library of Dwight D. Eisenhower (or, at least, those portions of Eisenhower’s library located at his farm in Gettysburg, PA). We zipped right through it, and the LT catalog now includes some 904 titles covering all sorts of different subjects, from humor to mysteries to biographies (check out the tag cloud). There are more Eisenhower books to be added from other locations, and we will add those later on as the source material becomes available.

Thanks to all those who helped out with this library: KCGordon (who also sussed out the source list for us), cpirmann, tortoise, Esquiress, mrmapcase, jcbrunner, buk1968, and waitingtoderail.

George C. Marshall. Nearly 900 titles from the library of American military commander and cabinet secretary George C. Marshall were recently added to LibraryThing by KCGordon, who obtained a list of the books in the collections of the Marshall House (previously known as Dodona Manor) in Leesburg, VA. Lots and lots of history, military, and government books on Marshall’s shelves, as you might expect, but he also had a fair number of humor books, French literature, and poetry titles as well.

With whom does Marshall share the most books in common? Why Ernest Hemingway and Carl Sandburg, of course.

Lewis Carroll. Last but certainly not least, BarkingMatt has finished work on the library of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known to us as Lewis Carroll), amounting to some 2,600 titles from auction and bookseller catalogs. Some of the catalog descriptions are quite useful, giving information on the presentation signatures or marginal notations in the books: Carroll’s copy of Idylls of the King, for example, was presented to Carroll by Tennyson himself, while a copy of a play derived from Alice in Wonderland contains “notes in pencil by [Carroll] criticising the performance.”

A huge thanks to all the volunteers who have worked on these libraries! As I mentioned at the top, there are a number of new, exciting Legacy projects being worked on now, but I’m going to save those for another post since this one’s gotten fairly extensive already (I’ll be posting about completions more frequently in future, so we don’t run up quite such a backlog—my apologies). But I did promise an answer to the trivia question: which novel is held in common by five of the seven newest Legacy Libraries?

Drum roll please … the answer is Jane Eyre, copies of which are to be found in the libraries of Pym, Eisenhower, Joyce, Carroll, and Thackeray. See other books these libraries share, or take a look at the books you have in common with them here.


How can I help? We’re always looking for volunteers to help catalog Legacy Libraries. Come join the Legacy Libraries group: introduce yourself, tell us some authors or other historical figures you’re interested in, and we’ll come up with a good Legacy project that would benefit from your help. If you know of somebody important we’re missing, let us know: if we can add their library, we will!

Labels: legacy libraries

Saturday, July 6th, 2013

New Legacy Library projects: Truman, Voltaire

We’ve got a couple fun new Legacy Libraries projects in the works, and welcome volunteers to help us catalog the books!

Harry Truman’s “home study” library from his Independence, Missouri residence is already in LibraryThing (see it at the Harry Truman profile page), but we now also have a list of books from his “working office” at the Harry S Truman Library and Museum to add, so let’s get to it!

See the Talk thread or jump right to the project wiki page to get started and claim your section of the library list. No worries if you haven’t worked on a Legacy Libraries project before – this is definitely a good introduction to them! I’ll be helping out too, and will answer any questions you have on the Talk thread.

We’re also currently getting started on Voltaire’s library, which may be a little trickier but still promises to be great fun! You can watch progress on this one here, and please feel free to jump in and help (given the nature of Voltaire’s collection, we’re looking at you, French/Russian readers!).

There’s a discussion thread where we’re figuring out a good work-plan for this one, and a wiki page where you can claim a section and add some books.

Have fun, and thanks in advance for joining us on these!

Labels: legacy libraries

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Flash-mob: Help catalog Eisenhower’s Library!

Thanks to LibraryThing member kcgordon, we have a list of the books at the Eisenhower National Historic Site in Gettysburg, PA, so we thought it would be fun to do a quick flash-mob of these (there aren’t a huge number of books, so this probably won’t take too long).

We’ve kicked things off already (see Eisenhower’s profile page) but there are quite a few books still to be added, and we’d love to have your help!

See the Talk thread or jump right to the project wiki page to get started and claim your section of the library list. No worries if you haven’t worked on a Legacy Libraries project before – this is definitely a good introduction to them! I’ll be helping out too, and will answer any questions you have on the Talk thread.

NB: Another LTer is working on obtaining a list of additional Eisenhower books from his home in Kansas, so with any luck at all we’ll be able to add those soon as well. We’ll keep you posted!

Labels: flash-mob cataloging, fun, legacy libraries

Wednesday, September 5th, 2012

Flash-mob: Help catalog Rudyard Kipling’s library!

As part of our Legacy Library 5th-birthday celebrations, we’re kicking of a flash-mob cataloging party for the library of Rudyard Kipling. We’ll be working from the shelf-list of Kipling’s library at his home, Bateman’s.

Kipling (1865-1936), is well known for his fiction and poems, and he accumulated quite a neat library, judging by a somewhat cursory glance at the inventory. It’ll be fascinating to see what it looks like when all the books are in LT.

We’d love to have your help! See the Talk thread or jump right to the project wiki page to get started and claim your section of the library list. No worries if you haven’t worked on a Legacy Libraries project before – this is definitely a good introduction to them! I’ll be helping out too, and will answer any questions you have on the Talk thread.

[UPDATE: We’re done! Thanks to the eighteen volunteers who helped out!]

Labels: flash mob, flash-mob cataloging, legacies, legacy libraries

Monday, September 3rd, 2012

Legacy Libraries, Five Years On …

Five years ago today we launched the Legacy Libraries group (formerly and affectionately known as “I See Dead People[‘s Books]”. The project, now with its own homepage, has grown far beyond what we originally intended when a small group of volunteers started cataloging Thomas Jefferson’s library. Some numbers:

  • 157: Legacy Libraries completed to date, with 60 more currently in progress (the full list)
  • 19: libraries of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence cataloged so far
  • 16: libraries of Mayflower passengers documented
  • 8: libraries of actors added or suggested
  • 1,401: Libraries of Early America on which data has been collected to date
  • 153,232: books added to Legacy Library catalogs so far
  • 8: flash-mob catalog projects, including Frederick Douglass and the H.M.S. Beagle (see below for the next one!)
  • 433: members of the Legacy Libraries group
  • ~160: members who have contributed to at least one Legacy Library
  • 59: Legacy Library catalogs which contain a copy of the works of Shakespeare

    To mark the occasion of the fifth birthday, some announcements:

    Badges! All LibraryThing members who’ve helped with a Legacy Library should now find on their profile page a new “award,” which we’ve named the Legacy Lagniappe. If you don’t have one and should, email me (jeremy@librarything.com) with your LT username and the Legacy catalog you worked on (some of the early records are a bit hazy). We’re glad to finally be able to recognize those members who’ve helped out, at least in some small way. The project wouldn’t be what it is without your contributions and your help! I’ve also been working on trying to connect a few LT libraries which should probably be brought into the Legacies fold, so if you were involved with one of those, please be in touch.

    Boswell Completed. One huge project has recently reached completion: the library of James Boswell, underway since early October 2008, now contains 5,047 titles! Congratulations and thanks to LTers moibibliomaniac, larxol, and aynar. Jerry Morris (moibibliomaniac) sent along this note:

    “When, after thirteen long months of cataloging, Boswell cataloging team member larxol declared the cataloging of the library of James Boswell complete in November 2009, he included the following proviso:
    ‘… “complete,” in the sense that all the books we know about at this time have an entry.’

    Little did he know …

    In Feb 2010, James Caudle, the Associate Editor Yale Editions of the Papers of James Boswell, read my announcement in a recent issue of The Johnsonian News Letter that both the Samuel Johnson and James Boswell Libraries could be viewed online at Library Thing. He congratulated us for our efforts and offered his assistance in the form of additional catalogues and lists we and probably most of the rest of the world were unaware of.

    In May 2010, we began the cataloging of the 1893 Auchinleck Sale (books owned by generations of Boswells), to be followed in rabid, if not rapid, succession with the cataloging of the 1916 Sotheby Sale, the 1917 Dowell Sale, the 1810 Catalogue of Greek and Latin Classics (written by Alexander Boswell), the c.1770 Catalogue of Books Belonging to James Boswell (written by James Boswell himself), and finally, Boswell’s Curious Productions, a catalogue of chapbooks belonging to James Boswell.

    Thanks go to the Boswell cataloging team: larxol, aynar, and myself (moibibliomaniac); to James Caudle; to Yale undergraduates Jing fen-Su (c.1770 catalogue) and Jacob Sider Jost (Curious Productions); to Boswell researcher Terry Seymour; to Boswell collector Paul T. Ruxin; to James Boswell himself; and to Library Thing and its Legacy Libraries for making these least four years enlightening and enjoyable.”

    A Selected Catalogue. In 1793, the librarian at Harvard College, Thaddeus Mason Harris, published a pamphlet titled A Seleced [sic] Catalogue of some of the most esteemed Publications in the English Language. Proper to form a Social Library: with an introduction upon the choice of Books (Printed at Boston, by I. Thomas and E. T. Andrews, Faust’s Statue, No. 45, Newbury Street, 1793). Harris wrote in the introduction of his choices:

    “As it has been my endeavour to form a catalogue for a small and cheap library, intended to suit the tastes and circumstances of common readers, many valuable works, in the higher departments of science, have been intentionally omitted. And imperfect as the list may be found, in other respects, yet I trust it will appear that there are sufficient under each head to give a satisfactory and comprehensive (though in some instances very short) view of that particular department of knowledge.”

    This weekend I added Harris’ catalog to LT: see it at SocialLibrary1793. How does your library stack up to the Harvard Librarian’s recommendations from more than two centuries ago? See my overlap (17 titles), or yours (if you’re logged in).

    Coming soon: Kipling Flash-mob! We’ve got a great list of books from Rudyard Kipling’s library, and this week we’ll be starting a flash-mob to catalog them into LibraryThing. Watch the blog for an announcement about details tomorrow or Wednesday, and save some time to join in!

    Finally, from me, a big and very heartfelt THANK YOU to everyone who’s helped out with these projects over the last five years, and to Tim for taking an interest and letting us run with the idea way back then! We’ve got a lot more work to do, but it’s great fun, so if you’re interested in helping out with a current project, know of another library we ought to add, or want to begin a project of your own, please be in touch (jeremy@librarything.com, jbd1 on LT, or @JBD1 on Twitter). Here’s to many more years of this important, endlessly-fascinating project!

    If you want to discuss the state of the Legacy Libraries at five years, head over to the Talk thread.

  • Labels: flash-mob cataloging, legacies, legacy libraries

    Wednesday, July 4th, 2012

    Signers’ Libraries on LibraryThing

    Did you know that in addition to the libraries of more than 1.5 million members from around the world, LibraryThing is also home to the libraries of (so far) 19 Signers of the Declaration of Independence? The Legacy Libraries project started with a Signer (Thomas Jefferson), and we’ve continued to add to our “collection” over the past few years. You can see the status and source notes we’ve found so far for all 56 Signers here. Of the 19 that have been entirely or substantially added to LibraryThing already are four of the five members of the committee responsible for drafting the Declaration:

  • Thomas Jefferson (Virginia), 5,597 cataloged
  • John Adams (Massachusetts), 1,741 cataloged
  • Benjamin Franklin (Pennsylvania), 3,747 cataloged
  • Roger Sherman (Connecticut), 105 cataloged*
  • The other Signers represented on LibraryThing so far:

  • John Hancock (Massachusetts), 91 cataloged
  • George Clymer (Pennsylvania), 41 cataloged
  • Elbridge Gerry (Massachusetts), 326 cataloged
  • Button Gwinnett (Georgia), 12 cataloged
  • Stephen Hopkins (Rhode Island), 91 cataloged
  • Richard Henry Lee (Virginia), 503 cataloged
  • Thomas Lynch, Jr. (South Carolina), 38 cataloged
  • Thomas McKean (Delaware), 49 cataloged
  • Lewis Morris (New York), 113 cataloged
  • Robert Treat Paine (Massachusetts), 550 cataloged
  • George Read (Maryland), 13 cataloged
  • Caesar Rodney (Delaware), 13 cataloged
  • George Taylor (Pennsylvania), 35 cataloged
  • John Witherspoon (New Jersey), 988 cataloged
  • George Wythe (Virginia), 369 cataloged
  • All told, the Signers’ libraries added so far include 14,421 titles. You can check out the top books shared among the Signers’ libraries here. Top five:

  • Commentaries on the Laws of England by Sir William Blackstone
  • A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America by John Adams
  • The Spectator by Joseph Addison et al.
  • Euclid’s Elements
  • Virgil’s Poems
  • If you’re signed into LibraryThing, see what books you have in common with Signers of the Declaration of Independence on your Legacy Libraries stats page (just choose Advanced options and compare the Signers to you). Here’s my list, or see Tim’s.

    Browse the information we’ve collected so far about the other Signers’ libraries here; updates and new information is always appreciated; drop me an email anytime or post a message in the group! We’re always collecting new sources and adding new books for these libraries, so every little piece is welcome.

    Another key Founding-era library on LibraryThing is that of George Washington, who was otherwise engaged in July 1776. You might have seen one of his books in the news recently.

    Beyond the Signers are the broader Libraries of Early America; we’ve found data on more than 1,250 pre-1825 libraries so far, with more added regularly. Or there are the libraries of Mayflower passengers (one of my favorite groups to work with at the moment).

    We’ll be continuing to catalog additional libraries, and to enhance the tools we use to analyze, display and share this material with the world, so stay tuned!


    * The fifth member of the committee, Robert R. Livingston of New York, left Congress before the Declaration was signed. His library on LibraryThing is in progress. Also still to be added is the library of Charles Thomson, the secretary of the Continental Congress when the Declaration was signed.

    Labels: jefferson, john adams, legacies, legacy libraries