I was sitting at a table in the reading room of the rare book division of the Library of Congress, and Dan De Simone, a curator there, was showing me books from what has been considered ever since its acquisition in 1815 the library's founding collection: the 6,487-volume library that Thomas Jefferson built up over decades of buying books. At the time it was the largest library, public or private, in the United States. Jefferson sold his books to the United States after the British burned the Capitol during the War of 1812, destroying the original Library of Congress, which consisted of a couple of thousand law books.

Jefferson's books were far more than that. They included the Greek and Roman classics, both in translation and in the original languages, which Jefferson read fluently. He owned numerous architectural books, being a talented practitioner of that art. There were political tracts and pamphlets by the hundred, and not just in English but in French, Italian, Spanish, and German, all of which he either spoke or read. He had books on winemaking (Jefferson was the first expert on wines this country had, and his collection of French wines was legendary), on gardening, on both American and world history. He owned a set of Diderot's great , one of the most magnificent achievements of the Enlightenment, and, of course, the books of many other philosophes, many of whom Jefferson knew personally from the five years he spent in Paris as the U.S. minister to the French court.

De Simone had gone to the well and brought me a group of historical blockbusters. He handed me one. It was Jefferson's own copy of his manual on parliamentary procedure, which he wrote in 1801 for the use of the United States Senate. It was used, it turned out, more by the House than the Senate, but still, to hold, to touch, a book Jefferson himself once held was, shall we say, rather awesome. The book, it turns out, is also a survivor.

Of the 6,487 books Jefferson sold to the country in 1815, most were destroyed in 1851, when a faulty chimney flue caught fire in the library, then still housed in the Capitol, on Christmas Eve. By the time it was over, two-thirds of the library's collection, some 35,000 volumes, had been lost, including 4,000 of Jefferson's books.

If you visit the Library of Congress today you will probably go to see the room where Jefferson's books are exhibited in big, handsome exhibition cases made in Germany and arranged in a spiral, almost like a Richard Serra sculpture. It is by far the library's most popular exhibit, with well over a million visitors a year. And you will find those cases filled with more than 6,000 books, because Jefferson's original library has been almost completely reconstituted—not the burned books themselves, obviously, but duplicates, the same editions, published by the same publishers in the same years, in the same cities.

The story of how this was done stands as the greatest feat of bookmanship in our time. It's also a detective story that includes De Simone's three-month hunt through the back rooms of rare book stores all over Europe; the generosity of Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys; and an anonymous agent who went into the rare book market to ferret out the missing books without giving away the fact that he was buying for the Library of Congress.

The next book De Simone showed me was Jefferson's own copy of the Federalist Papers, a first edition given to him by Elizabeth Hamilton, wife of his enemy Alexander Hamilton, with her name written in delicate script on the title page. It includes in Jefferson's own neat hand a list of the authors of each paper, all of which had been published anonymously under the pseudonym Publius.

It was enough to send a shiver down my spine. The Federalist Papers were the first and are still the classic explanation of the Constitution, written when it was by no means certain that enough of the 13 original states would ratify it to bring the United States into being. Published in newspapers all over the country, they played a prime role in persuading reluctant states to sign on. You can think of them as a kind of unofficial addendum to the Constitution. First editions of them are quite rare, and, as association copies go, this one is king of the hill.

Interestingly enough, the library also has James Madison's copy of the same book. Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay were the chief authors of the papers. Madison's copy also includes a handwritten list of the authors of the various papers. But Madison's list differs from Jefferson's. "I'd guess there have been half a dozen dissertations written on the differences," De Simone said, smiling slyly, "in the last 20 years." Jefferson's library, in short, is not just important, it stands at the very heart of the nation.

The rare book market is just what its name suggests: rarefied, small, intimate, gossipy. Everyone knows every-one else, either personally or by reputation, and you can literally fit all the important dealers into one room: the Park Avenue Armory in New York, at the annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, held every April. When the job of finding duplicates of Jefferson's original books came up, the market was in the midst of a long-term sea change. New, raw money was coming into it, and these new collectors weren't interested in collecting all the works of, say, John Milton or Ernest Hemingway, or in every single thing they could find pertaining to Sherlock Holmes. They wanted only highlights: Paradise Lost in first edition, a signed first of The Sun Also Rises, or maybe even a first printing of the Declaration of Independence; the last one to come on the market sold for $8 million in 2000. Bill Gates appears to be typical. He plunged into rare books by spending $30.8 million in 1994 for the Codex Leicester, 72 pages of drawings and notes on vellum by Leonardo da Vinci. There's not much evidence that Gates is otherwise interested in rare books.

This new-style market, much lamented by purists, has driven the price of , in dust jacket, into six figures. Without the dust jacket it brings in the low four, and the rest of Fitzgerald's work is of little interest to these new collectors.

The task of finding and buying Jefferson's lost books fell to Mark Dimunation, who runs the Rare Book and Special Collections division of the library. A big, friendly, rumpled man with a great deal of energy, Dimunation, 61, was hired away from Cornell University, and he remembers a meeting in 1998, shortly after he was hired, at which the Librarian of Congress, James Billington, asked, "What shall we do to commemorate the library's bicentennial in 2000?" Dimunation answered, "How about reconstituting Jefferson's original library?" Everyone seemed to think that was a wonderful idea. Dimunation was given two years to do the job.

He's now on year 15. The job wouldn't have been possible at all without the pioneering work of E. Millicent Sowerby, one of the first women to break into the openly misogynistic world of rare books and manuscripts. In 1942 the library had decided, in preparation for celebrating the bicentennial of Jefferson's birth a year later, to hire her to construct a catalog of Jefferson's books, not just the survivors but all 6,487 of them, every book Jefferson had sold to the library so many years before.

It was thought this would take two years too. It took 17. But she did it. By the time the last of its five massive volumes appeared, in 1959, the Sowerby catalog had become the vade mecum of Jefferson scholarship. You could not know Jefferson's mind without knowing what he read and knew, and the Sowerby catalog had become the gate into that incredibly fertile field.

It also became the path to reconstituting the collection. Thanks to Sowerby, Dimunation could do the obvious thing first: search through the library's own enormous holdings—which number in the millions—for the books in her bibliography. They would have been duplicates of Jefferson's books, if Jefferson's hadn't been destroyed in the fire. "It was like a big hunt, a big treasure hunt," says Dimunation. And because he was also doing his regular job, itself demanding, he did it mostly at night, and he speaks ruefully of two years of 18-hour days. But he has no complaints. He remembers in particular his feeling of triumph at finding a rare pamphlet describing the first manned balloon ascent in America. A pioneer of ballooning in France, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, made the flight from a prison yard in Philadelphia in January 1793. George Washington was in attendance. So was Jefferson. So was John Adams. In fact, more present and future presidents attended than any other event in the subsequent course of American history. It was a sweet find. Dimunation turned it up in the stacks.

Dimunation would ultimately find in the library's collection 2,000 duplicates of the lost Jefferson books, cutting the list of missing books in half. But that left another 2,000, still an intimidating number. Dimunation had no choice but to enter the rare book market and try to find the rest of the missing books there. He knew, of course, that if he himself had stirred this little pot, had sent out a list of his desiderata to the principal dealers in the United States and Europe, prices for books that ordinarily would not have been worth very much might have doubled, or more. After all, Jefferson's name is magic. The Library of Congress is one of the greatest libraries, if not the greatest, in the world. But it was not as if the library had unlimited amounts of money to spend on this project. While I was there De Simone took me into the vault and showed me a pristine large-paper copy of Galileo's second book, issued in 1610, the one where he illustrates the positions of the moons of Jupiter as seen through the telescope he invented as those positions change day by day, thereby destroying forever the Aristotelian theory, accepted for 2,000 years, that the heavens were fixed. The book contains notes in Galileo's handwriting. This is a book with a very hefty price tag, and well worth the money (which had been donated by a private source). Fortunately, Jefferson did not own books like that. He was not a book collector in the current sense. He did not buy large-paper copies; he preferred small, cheap editions, the 18th-century equivalent of trade paperbacks, when he could get them. A fourth edition of Locke on Education, say, printed in Dublin and in effect pirated from the English holder of the copyright, suited him fine. Jefferson also owned the 18th-century equivalents of Kitty Kelley tell-alls, Tableau de Paris and L'Espion Anglois, which were accounts of the contemporary French court and its numerous scandals. He thought these were important enough that he sent copies to Madison in Virginia, describing Tableau de Paris, a little apologetically, as "truly a picture of private manners in Paris, but presented on the dark side." So there was no one book on the level of the Galileo. Nevertheless, 2,000 books is a lot of scarce old books to buy; financial support for the project was essential.

Hard-driving, hard-bitten sports moguls do not immediately strike you as being likely to be much interested in rare books. But Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, is a member of the James Madison Council, a group of businessmen put together in 1990 as a "private sector advisory council" to the Library of Congress, i.e., an open sesame to big money grants for special projects like this. On April 14, 1999, Jones and his wife Gene gave a million dollars to the library to help fund the search for Jefferson's missing books, while personally presenting a second edition of James Harris's (London, 1765). Reconstituting Jefferson's library is, as Dimunation says, "a really American project"—suitable for the owner of America's Team. Jones describes himself as an avid reader, and he was, he told me, "particularly interested in Jefferson's books because it was a working library, with practical books as well as intellectual. You could learn about how to make whiskey or build a plow as well as about intellectual subjects." Jones is putting together a small Jefferson collection of his own with the help of the library's curators. His million-dollar gift was not a casual one.

Next, Dimunation recruited a book dealer he knew to comb the rare book catalogs, visit bookshops, and buy the remaining books as if on his own account, not mentioning Jefferson, not mentioning the library, doing the work quietly and without getting credit for it. Neither Dimunation nor De Simone would tell me, or anybody else for that matter, who this individual—let's call him Agent Bookman—was. Not only did he make the searches and do the buying, he refused to take a commission, charging the library only his costs.

For a few years things went quickly. Books would come in monthly, 10 or 15 at a time, carefully packed as only a bookman can pack books, and Dimunation would open them, eager for the riches inside. But eventually Agent Bookman's river dwindled to a stream, the stream to a brook, and the brook dried up. The problem was Jefferson himself. He had cared much more for the content of books than for their value as collectibles, and it is the collectibles that survive the centuries. Agent Bookman, meanwhile, is still out there somewhere, unwilling to make himself known; nor will he give an anonymous interview, even though he finished his work on this project eight years ago. I tried the names of various well-known dealers. They just smiled and shook their heads. Agent Bookman—who of course may in fact be Agent Bookwoman.

In 2000 the Library of Congress hired Dan De Simone. Small, slender, and intense, as opposed to Dimunation, who is big, rumpled, and genial, De Simone was brought on to be the curator of the library's Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, a treasure house of illustrated books and manuscripts. (It includes the Galileo book.) De Simone has one of the best jobs to be had in the world of books, and he knows it.

He also had experience as a rare book dealer and had spent several years in Europe dealing in them. He knows the European scene very well, and a plan evolved that he spend a summer in Europe doing what Agent Bookman had done, combing the back rooms of shops, where they kept their less valuable books, and digging out some of the last of those fourth or fifth editions, the duodecimos Jefferson was so fond of. It was what Jefferson had done as well. When he had free time, Jefferson would stop in at the Paris bookshops and book stalls, turning over every volume, looking especially for books relating to the early history of America. He spent his first summer in Paris, indeed, doing little else.

With some 600 titles remaining to be found, De Simone got to Paris in late July 2006. The trip yielded 16 books. A trip to London gathered in 64 more, the Netherlands another 50. He also used agents he knew in countries he could not visit, sending them precise lists of what was needed. His greatest coup? In London, De Simone talked to a dealer about a book of Jefferson's that he thought he would never find, a collection of four pamphlets about gaming that Jefferson had had bound; the first of them was by Edmond Hoyle, and it was his pamphlet on the rules of whist. The dealer exclaimed that he had recently sold just such a collection. He would call the person he had sold them to. Perhaps he would be willing to part with them. He was. The pamphlets are now part of the library's Jefferson collection. "It gives you a chill just to touch them," Jones says. De Simone still can't get over his luck.

The list is now down to less than 250 books, and the books are still trickling in. You can see what they are if you visit the Jefferson collection in the library. Among the books, scattered around the shelves, are white cardboard boxes the size of books with labels on the spines identifying them. Some of them seem as if they would be quite common, but appearances are deceiving. Take Von Pufendorf's (Amsterdam, 1732). Pufendorf was an Enlightenment political theorist, well known and widely published during his lifetime, but this is one of his lesser works. He wrote in Latin, but this is a French translation, published 40 years after his death. How many copies were printed? What size was the book? Is it brief? Might it therefore have been bound with other short books and pamphlets, and might the label on the spine not even mention it?

Dimunation is sending letters to the trade now, creating a pool of people to look for the last books. "I don't think we'll ever finish," he admits. "But I also like the poetic idea that it's an ongoing operation." Maybe, he adds, it shouldn't be finished after all. "The scholarship on Jefferson," he points out, "will never be finished."

Of course, the books—both the replacements and the originals—are not just for display. Any qualified scholar can use them, sit in that same reading room, and hold, as I did, Jefferson's own copy of the Federalist Papers. The insights Jefferson gained from his reading are the ones that made the United States, which is itself an ongoing project. Dimunation is right: Perhaps it's fitting that the search for the last few of Jefferson's lost books should go on indefinitely.

But still. Maybe you're a collector and you have a copy of Bolingbroke's Patriot King, specifically the 1741 edition, no doubt printed in Dublin. Or the Mémoires de la Société d'Agriculture du Département de la Seine (Paris, 1801–8) or Osborne's Narrative of Charles First's Imprisonment in the Isle of Wight (London, 1662) or that elusive Pufendorf. Wouldn't it be sweet to contribute it to the heart of the nation?

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