The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building
In late fall 1997, the 100th anniversary of the opening of the original Library of Congress Building, W.W. Norton and the Library of Congress will publish The Library of Congress: The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building. Comprising some 320 pages with more than 250 illustrations (most in full color), this celebration of one of the country's great architectural landmarks tells the story behind the building's construction and the unparalleled cooperation between government, artists and artisans that resulted in a state-of-the-art congressional and national library, as well as an artistic monument to knowledge and intellectual pursuits.
Opening with a preface by Dr. Billington, the book includes introductory essays by historian and Librarian of Congress Emeritus Daniel J. Boorstin and author Brenden Gill; an essay on the history of the Jefferson Building and what it took to achieve it by John Y. Cole, as well as essays on the sculpture, paintings and mosaics that decorate the building and the artists who created them.
The centerpiece of the book is an edited and updated version of Handbook of the New Library of Congress in Washington by Herbert Small, a comprehensive guidebook first published in 1897 when the Thomas Jefferson Building opened to the public. Three photo essays -- including one on the recently completed renovation of the Jefferson Building overseen by the Architect of the Capitol -- and a full-color schema of the Jefferson Building round out this handsome and informative volume.
Eyes of the Nation: A Visual History of the United States
In choosing to create and collect certain pictures and documents, people become accidental historians -- candid commentators on the values and spirit of their age. Eyes of the Nation, by Vincent Virga and curators of the Library of Congress with Alan Brinkley (available in Nov., Alfred A. Knopf, publisher), carries this principle to its logical extreme by reproducing, in full color, 500 of the most significant and powerful artifacts in the Special Collections of the Library of Congress. Both practical reference and sumptuous object in its own right, this book unleashes American history at its purest: as an exhilarating fireworks display.
Appearing alongside such landmarks of our nation's development as an Indian treaty of 1714, a "wanted" poster for John Wilkes Booth, and J. Robert Oppenheimer's notes on nuclear reactions are the relics of popular culture, the stuff of social history: the label from a bottle of patent medicine, an Ansel Adams photograph of interned Japanese Americans playing baseball, a Pogo comic strip attacking Joseph McCarthy. Complementing the visual narrative is an elegant and informative text by the distinguished historian Alan Brinkley that proceeds from exploration, colonization and the founders' "great experiment" through the grave crises of the 19th and 20th centuries right up to the present.
