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Thomas Je√erson, Colporteur of the Enlightenment frank shuffelton When Thomas Jefferson’s boyhood home, Shadwell, burned on February 1, 1770, he most mourned the loss of his library. In a letter to his college friend, John Page, he calculated ‘‘the cost of the books burned to have been £200. sterling. Would to god it had been the money; then had it never cost me a sigh!’’∞ There were books that he had inherited from his father, classical literature that he had first read during his school days, law books and notebooks that he had collected to support his legal practice, and works from writers like Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Kames that permanently shaped his sense of himself and his place in the world. Losing the law books was a setback to his legal career, but to lose the larger library was in a very real sense to lose a piece of himself. He wasted no time in beginning to rebuild his library, sending o√ two orders for books to Fearon Benson and Thomas Waller of London later in the spring. He appealed to ‘‘them most earnestly to lose not a day in sending them.’’≤ When he took a census of his collection on August 4, 1773, he counted 1,256 volumes located in the northwest and northeast corners of the library room of Monticello, including 18 ‘‘lying about’’ and another 42 ‘‘lent out.’’≥ All his life Je√erson literally surrounded himself with books. His slave Isaac remembered that ‘‘Old Master had abundance of books; sometimes would have twenty of ‘em down on the floor at once—read fust one, then tother. Isaac has often wondered how Old Master came to have such a mighty head; 138 Frank Shu√elton read so many of them books; and when they go to ax him anything, he go right straight to the book and tell you all about it.’’∂ When he sold his library to the nation in 1815 to become the basis of the Library of Congress, he had acquired an additional 5,500 volumes. As the presence in the 1773 census of 42 volumes ‘‘lent out’’ suggests, Je√erson’s books did not constitute a solitary retreat. On the contrary, books became a medium through which Je√erson communicated with an extended body of friends and associates in the transatlantic world. He loaned books to others, invited them to use his library, bought books for them, recommended lists of books that they might read for various purposes, and encouraged the creation of libraries that would make books available to larger publics. It was in this sense that Je√erson stood out as a ‘‘colporteur,’’ a term that needs some special interpretation to apply to his activities. Colporteurs were traveling booksellers in the years from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century who sold at public fairs and markets a wide range of popular materials: Bibles , chapbooks, cookbooks, medical books, primers, almanacs, manuals, romances, fairy tales, and tales of adventure. Colporteurs were on the bottom rung of the business of book distribution, and the materials they carried were often of a dubious character, yet they spoke to the imaginative desires and needs of ordinary people. In a revolutionary age, however, these desires often underwrote or prophesied enormous political and social change.∑ Je√erson was not usually dealing in popular or trashy materials when he provided books or reading lists to others, but he was responding to the imaginative and intellectual needs of people who desired to change themselves and the world they lived in. Je√erson was a colporteur of the Enlightenment itself, of that central movement of the eighteenth century that sought, in the words of Immanuel Kant, ‘‘man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage. . . . Sapere aude! ‘Have courage to use your own reason!’ ’’ said Kant, ‘‘That is the motto of enlightenment.’’∏ For Je√erson, the practice of freedom and his faith in the progress of the human mind—the ultimate fruits of reason according to Enlightenment belief—was grounded in his wide reading and in the books he wanted to make available to others. Je√erson early on acquired a reputation as a bibliographic authority. Edmund Randolph, his contemporary, noted that ‘‘it constituted a part of Mr. Je√erson’s pride to run before the times in which he lived. . . . He had been ambitious to collect a library, not merely amassing a number of books, but distinguishing them in subordination to every art and science.’’ Even [18.116.90...

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