Thomas Jefferson may have said that "I cannot live without books," but when the Library of Congress was in trouble, he sold his vast collection.

In one of the darkest episodes of the War of 1812, the British invaded Washington and burned down the Capitol building, including the 3,000 volumes of the Library of Congress housed there. At that time, Jefferson, an avid book collector who had been a strong supporter of the Library during his presidency, had the largest personal collection of books in the United States. After the 1814 fire, he sold Congress his private collection of 6,487 volumes for $23,950 to help restart the Library.

In 1851, a second fire in the Library destroyed nearly two-thirds of Jefferson's collection. Recently, the Library has begun to reassemble the original collection. At first criticized for its broad sweep of topics, Jefferson defended the scope this way: "There is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer."