Founding father and renaissance man Thomas Jefferson amassed a huge collection of books that became the basis for one of our early Libraries of Congress. Unfortunately, much of the collection was destroyed in a mid-nineteenth century fire, but intrepid librarians of the present Library of Congress have set about recreating his original 6000+ volume library.

It’s been a labor of love—and money, and sleuthing in the world of rare and antiquarian books—that has taken about ten years. Having visited Jefferson’s Monticello recently, and seen firsthand how his home and its furnishings reflect his unique and Apollonian mind as well as his remarkable esthetic sense, I’m not surprised that the new exhibit at the Library of Congress demonstrates the same. After all, look at any person’s bookshelves and you get more than a clue to his/her mind and interests.

With Jefferson, of course, the books themselves are just the starting point. I remember, for example, the guide at Monticello pointing out that the bookshelves in which some of them were displayed featured shelves that could be disassembled from the rest and taken along on travels in a single handy container, if desired.

How Jefferson’s books were catalogued is another point of interest. Lacking the ever-helpful Dewey Decimal System, he chose to use “Lord Bacon’s table of science, the hierarchy of Memory (History), Reason (Philosophy) and Imagination (Fine Arts) to order his arrangement.”

And what an “arrangement” it was! Jefferson often strove to merge the mental and abstract with the concrete physical world, seeking to unify both in a harmonious expression of beauty, order, and knowledge. And so it’s no surprise to find that certain of his books were not displayed in the ordinary manner, but were instead arranged “in a conch shell pattern, so that a person could walk into the middle and be surrounded by books.”

Surrounded by books. Those of us who are bibliophiles can only sigh in envy—or make it our business to visit the exhibit.

Jefferson was hardly a man who lived solely in his head. But he well understood the knowledge—and the pleasure—that books can convey. After all, he once wrote, “I cannot live without books.”

Jefferson may not have been able to live without books. But, thanks to this collection, his books are now able to live without him.