Drag your mouse over the images to see the volume before and after treatment
The French historian Jules Michelet (he coined the term "Renaissance") called Diderot's and D'Alembert's Encyclopédie a "victory of the human mind" – a triumph of enormous collaborative undertaking, of art, reason, and human innovation. Thomas Jefferson adopted the Encyclopédie's organizational categories of "Reason," "Memory," and "Imagination" to arrange his own library -- a collection of over 6,700[1] books. In 1815, after all but one of the Library's original books burned in the fire set to the Capitol by the British, the Library of Congress purchased Jefferson's collection (which is still arranged as Jefferson had it, following the Encyclopédie) in a first step to rebuild the library. Directly connected to the Encyclopédie through Jefferson's collection, the Library also holds a complete set of the Encyclopédie bearing the bookplate of our Constitutional wordsmither, Gouverneur Morris and the binder's ticket of Robert Aitken, the esteemed Philadelphia printer and bookbinder who bound all 30 volumes.
Exemplifying the skill of 18th century printing and an unparalleled secondary source on 18th century European craft and manufacturing, the chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division regularly includes the Library’s Encyclopédie in his teaching curricula (e.g., "The Eighteenth-Century Book ," Rare Book School).
As a result of the books' size, heft, binding structure, and history of use, both front and back covers broke off from all 30 volumes. This condition, especially for heavy, folio-sized books, exposes the books to high risk of considerable handling damage.
Since the 1980s, Library conservators have examined and monitored the set, bound in tree-calf in the French style, with intricate blind and gold tooling. Following investigation of the binding structure, Conservation developed a structurally and aesthetically successful treatment approach and hopes to complete the treatment of all 30 volumes. The treatment maintains the beauty and historical evidence of the original binding and returns each volume to safe, functional order.
[1] Sale of Books to the Library of Congress (1815) , Thomas Jefferson Foundation.
