The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, United States, Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
ISBN: 9780813943237
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2019-09-10T04:00:00+00:00

“At All Times His Chosen Companions”

Some Notes on What Books Meant to Thomas Jefferson

JURRETTA JORDAN HECKSCHER

THOMAS JEFFERSON’S granddaughter Ellen Randolph Coolidge was in many respects his most kindred spirit in his immediate family, the one whose acuity of intellect and subtlety of reflection most closely mirrored his own. She loved him deeply, and allowed him to inhabit her inner world so completely that in her later years, as she once wrote, when she dreamed, it was most often of him.1 It is significant, then, that when she began to describe him as she best remembered him—in the years of his retirement—she thought of him first with books. “He seemed to return to private life with great satisfaction,” she recalled. “[H]is love of reading alone would have made leisure and retirement delightful to him. Books were at all times his chosen companions.…”2

“Books were at all times his chosen companions.” Among the millions of words that have been written about Thomas Jefferson and books, these may be among the most suggestive, not for what they say about Jefferson’s intellectual life, but for what else they invite us to discover about how this man who could not live without books chose to live with them. For Thomas Jefferson, books were literal companions, a near-constant physical presence that he sought to fit to his bodily needs. They were also constant instruments of human companionship, purposefully directed toward nurturing those personal relationships that most deeply nourished his own soul. And throughout his life, he used books to order the experience of time, intimately integrating both the rhythms of the day and the seasons of life into the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom, delight and consolation.

Let us look more closely at what books meant to Jefferson in each of these ways, all of which give context to his design for his University’s curriculum and library.

“Turning Over Every Book with My Own Hands”: Books as Physical Objects

When Jefferson offered to sell his Monticello Library to Congress to replace the library the British had burned during the War of 1812, he described its creation in terms of his body and its gestures: “[W]hile residing in Paris I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hands, and putting by every thing which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare & valuable in every science.”3 Although he was known to praise a bookseller’s “tasty” bindings, he had little interest in books as aesthetic objects. They were instruments to be used—by the mind, but also by the body: to be lifted, and held, and handled, and carried, and scrutinized by eye for hours on end.4 And in that respect, their physical identity mattered greatly. “I disclaim all pompous editions and all typographical luxury,” he wrote to a favorite English book dealer, “but I like a fine white paper, neat type, and neat binding.…” And in matters of size, his preferences were unequivocal: “When I do not name the edition,” he instructed, “never send a folio or quarto if there exists an 8vo.

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