{"id":381,"date":"2016-02-16T16:41:13","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T16:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=381"},"modified":"2025-09-05T16:46:41","modified_gmt":"2025-09-05T15:46:41","slug":"jefferson-and-macintosh-in-paris-and-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/?p=381","title":{"rendered":"Jefferson (and Macintosh) in Paris and London"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Thomas<\/a>

Thomas Jefferson by Mather Brown (1786). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. NPG.99.66<\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

Until May, the Library of Congress is staging an exhibition\u2014Out of the Ashes: A New Library for Congress and the Nation<\/a>\u2014to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of its\u00a0acquisition in 1815 of Thomas Jefferson private library. Jefferson’s library\u20146,487 volumes strong\u2014was bought (for almost\u00a0$24,000) to replace an existing collection that\u00a0had been destroyed by the British during the War of 1812. Sadly, in 1851, a fire destroyed two thirds of the Jefferson collection<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Jefferson, an avid, life-long \u00a0book collector\u00a0considered his library to be<\/a> “unquestionably\u00a0the choicest collection of books in the US”. Jefferson added to his collection most enthusiastically while based in Paris (from August 1784 to September 1789) as Congressional representative\u00a0to Europe. Of his time in that city, Jefferson\u00a0later recalled<\/a>\u00a0that “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 hand, and putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science”.<\/p>\n

Jefferson’s book hunting was not, however, limited to Paris and continued just as enthusiastically during a visit to London in 1786, particularly so at the shop of the publisher John Stockdale,<\/a>\u00a0where Jefferson\u00a0is reported<\/a> to have “spent for books four times as much as he paid Mather Brown to paint his portrait [above]”. On his return to Paris, Jefferson wrote to Stockdale to request<\/a> additional books, including “Mc.Intosh & Capper\u2019s voiages [sic<\/em>].” (i.e., Macintosh’s Travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa<\/em> (1782) and James Capper’s\u00a0Observations on the passage to India<\/a><\/em> (1785)). At the same time, Jefferson attempted to obtain a second copy of\u00a0Travels<\/em> for his friend, the\u00a0Marquis de Lafayette<\/a>,\u00a0but found<\/a> to his disappointment that “Mc.Intosh\u2019s [book] is not to be bought, the whole edition being exhausted”.<\/p>\n

Jefferson’s copy of Travels<\/em>\u00a0was among\u00a0the\u00a06,487 volumes which comprised the Library of Congresses’s 1815 purchase, but was not, it appears, one that survived the 1851 fire. It is not currently clear whether or not the\u00a0Marquis de Lafayette ever managed to locate the copy of\u00a0Travels<\/em> he\u00a0desired.<\/p>\n

Stockdale, Eric. \u201cJohn Stockdale, London bookseller and publisher of Adams and Jefferson.\u201d In The libraries, leadership, and legacy of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson<\/em>, edited by Robert C. Baron and Conrad Edick Wright, 41\u201355. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 2010.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Until May, the Library of Congress is staging an exhibition\u2014Out of the Ashes: A New Library for Congress and the Nation\u2014to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of its\u00a0acquisition in 1815 of Thomas Jefferson private library. Jefferson’s library\u20146,487 volumes strong\u2014was bought (for almost\u00a0$24,000) to replace an existing collection that\u00a0had been destroyed by the British during the War […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=381"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1521,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/381\/revisions\/1521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inneskeighren.com\/williammacintosh\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}