HANDBOOK
OF THE NEW
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

The intention of this Handbook is to furnish such an account of the new buildingof the Library of Congress as may prove of interest to the general reader, and at thesame time serve as a convenient guide to actual visitors. To this latter end, asystem of headings and sub-headings has been introduced, and the building has beendescribed throughout in the order in which a visitor might naturally walk through it.Criticism has been avoided in the general description, but a brief survey of theartistic qualities of the Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting is given in Mr. Caffin’ssupplementary essay.

The writer had intended at first to give rather a full account of the collections ofthe Library, of the Smithsonian system of exchange, of the operation of the copyrightlaw, and of the general system under which the Library was carried on. Somuch of what he might have thus described, however, would have been entirelychanged, and so much more considerably modified, by the new methods of administrationmade possible and necessary by the new building, that it was decided to passlightly over all matters connected with the administration of the Library. Shouldanother edition of the Handbook be called for, it is hoped that there will be anopportunity to supply this omission. In the meantime it will be found that Mr.Spofford’s paper on the Function of a National Library will serve to indicate thegeneral scope of the institution.

The writer desires to express his great obligation, for much information andcourtesy, to Mr. Bernard R. Green, in charge of the Library during the time thatthis book was preparing, to Mr. Edward Pearce Casey, and to Mr. Spofford. Withouttheir assistance the book could hardly have been written. Thanks are due,also, to many of the individual artists for their courtesy in explaining the meaningand application of their work—and in particular to Mr. Elmer E. Garnsey, for agreat deal of painstaking assistance.

H. S.