I know I’m almost out of the 18-35 marketing bracket because I like to listen to NPR in the mornings on my way to work. This morning they had a great story about Thomas Jefferson’s library and how he used it to help jumpstart the Library of Congress.

They cover most of this in the story, so take a minute or two and listen if you’d like. If not, here’s my recap.

The British used 3,000 books to try and burn a building down in Washington D.C. when they came to town in 1814. Jefferson was upset this national collection was destroyed, so he offered to sell his private collection to the United States. The price was set, around $23,000, for his 6,000+ books and they were loaded up and shipped off Washington not too long after this event.In 1851 another fire, this one accidental, destroyed two-thirds of Jefferson’s original collection.

After this event the collection of the Library of Congress grew into one of the largest, if not the largest, collection of books in the world. Starting sixteen years ago staffers at the LoC started to reassemble Jefferson’s library as he would’ve experienced it. They sought out the same titles he had, from the same editions and even the same press. They discovered 2,000 books within their own collection, and picked up over 2,000 more at auction or from private collectors. Right now there are about 250 books from his collection that are unavailable, and may never be replaced because of their rarity today or obscurity in their own time.

Here’s the coolest part (at least to me). When you go to the Library of Congress today and request a volume from this collection, you know what happens? You get to read the book. A book that Jefferson pulled off the shelf to satisfy his own curiousity, can answer the same questions for us. LoC staffers have marked books from this collection with ribbons, and a green ribbon means a book belonged to Thomas Jefferson. Often when someone is instructed to keep the green ribbon with the volume they are using, they ask why. When it’s explained the ribbons are used to identify books that belonged to Thomas Jefferson, most people try to give the book back. The librarians refuse, because their original owner wouldn’t want them on a shelf collecting dust.

200 years ago, 6,487 books were enough knowledge to fill one man’s mind for a lifetime. I wonder how people will look back in 2214 and use to measure the knowledge we put in ours.