“I cannot live without books.”

Jefferson regarded books as “a necessary of life” and reading as "the greatest of all amusements.” He relied on his books as his chief source of inspiration and practical knowledge. He believed that education was key to building an enlightened and informed citizenry and to preserving democracy. 

Jefferson owned between 9,000 and 10,000 books in his lifetime. They covered a wide range of subjects that spanned human knowledge including history, philosophy, mathematics, law, science, architecture, and literature. By 1814, Jefferson’s library at Monticello had grown to more than 6,500 volumes, making his one of the largest private collections of the time.

On learning of the destruction of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. and the 3,000-volume congressional library housed there at the hands of British forces on August 24, 1814 during the War of 1812, Jefferson offered to sell his Monticello library to replace the one that was lost to enable Congress to continue to function as a legislative body. For fifty years, he had painstakingly assembled a collection that Jefferson deemed to have “no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.” Amid vocal Federalist objections, Congress finally agreed to purchase Jefferson’s library for the sum of $23,950, and the sale was signed into law by President James Madison on January 30, 1815.

Jefferson’s lifelong compulsion to feed his “canine appetite for reading” did not stop with the sale of his library. While preparing to send his books to their new home in the nation’s capital, Jefferson was already planning for himself a replacement library at Monticello, albeit very selectively and on a much smaller scale. He wrote to the American consul in Paris, David Bailie Warden, “I have now to make up again a collection for my self of such as may amuse my hours of reading.” Between 1815 and 1819, Jefferson tapped booksellers in Europe and in metropolitan centers like Philadelphia and New York to replenish his empty bookshelves. 

On February 5, 1815, Jefferson received George Ticknor and Francis Calley Gray, two young gentlemen who had traveled from Boston carrying letters of recommendation from John Adams to “see Monticello, its Library and its Sage.” Both men left a lasting impression on Jefferson. Ticknor, who sailed to Europe after visiting Monticello to further his literary studies, later helped procure books for Jefferson. In his June 10, 1815 letter to Adams, Jefferson referred to Ticknor as “the best bibliograph I have met with, and very kindly and opportunely offered me the means of reprocuring some part of the literary treasures which I have ceded to Congress.” What followed in the letter is the line we now so often associate with Jefferson: “I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”

By the time of Jefferson’s death in 1826, this reconstituted Monticello library had grown to some 1,600 volumes. A quarter of the size of the library he sold to Congress, Jefferson’s last library at Monticello was a collection of “the greater part of his favourite authors.” It represented Jefferson’s retirement interests over the last eleven years of his life. 

Jefferson stipulated in his will that his library was to become part of the University of Virginia’s collection after his death. Sadly, in an effort to help settle his debts, it was dispersed at auction in Washington, D.C. from February 27 to March 11, 1829, with the remainder sold off later in a smaller sale held in Philadelphia on December 3, 1831.