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1800
Congress began its library in 1800 with 740 books and three maps
On April 24, 1800, John Adams signed an act of Congress that paid for books for the use of Congress. Books were ordered from London and housed in the new Capitol.
740books, with three maps, in the first collection
Jefferson
British forces burned the library in 1814, and Jefferson's books replaced it
In August 1814 British forces burned several federal buildings, among them the Library of Congress, where over 3,000 volumes were lost. Congress then bought Jefferson's personal collection. A fire in 1851 destroyed two-thirds of his original books.
6,487books in Jefferson's personal collection
The building
A new building went up between 1890 and 1897
The Thomas Jefferson Building is the oldest of the library's three buildings. The library moved in from the Capitol in 1897 with more than 840,000 volumes, 40 percent of them acquired through copyright deposit.
Copyright
Since 1870 it has received two copies of every copyrightable work
In 1870 the library gained the right to receive two copies of every copyrightable work printed in the United States. Librarian Ainsworth Rand Spofford directed it from 1865 to 1897 and built support for a national library.
Treasures
The collection includes a Gutenberg Bible and a 1507 world map
The library holds one of only three perfect vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible and the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence. It acquired the only copy of the 1507 Waldseemüller world map in 2003.
173 millionitems in the collections, approximately
Day 3, midday
It comes after U.S. Capitol and the Capitol Visitor Center. Then Eastern Market.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Library of Congress, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.