First Lady Laura Bush and Librarian of Congress James Billington opened the first National Book Festival in a brief public ceremony on the Neptune Plaza of the Library of Congress at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, September 8, 2001. Inspired by the success of the Texas Book FestivalExternal, Bush founded the National Book Festival with the Library of Congress during her first year in the White House.

The event featured sixty award-winning and/or nationally-known authors and illustrators of books for adults and children. The authors, who also signed their books, were joined by fifteen NBA players promoting the league’s “Read to Achieve” program. The festival also included musical performances, consultations with some of the Library’s experts, and demonstrations of Library of Congress programs and services. Approximately 30,000 people attended presentations until 5:00 p.m. that day, inside and on the grounds of the Library of Congress and on the east lawn of the United States Capitol. Based on its initial success, the festival has become an annual event.

Over time, the National Book Festival’s venue migrated from the Library and the Capitol’s east lawn to the National Mall, and finally to the indoor DC Convention Center. The 2020 and 2021 festivals were held online because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recordings of most of the presentations from past National Book Festival events are available as videos on the Library’s website and/or via the Library of Congress YouTube Channel.

Before the first National Book Festival, the Library commissioned Texas painter Lu Ann Barrow to create original artwork for a poster to commemorate the event. In June 2001, the Library gave copies of the poster to attendees of the American Library Association’s annual conference, and then mailed copies to bookstores, schools, and libraries in and around Washington, D.C., along with a letter encouraging the recipients to help publicize the festival. More free posters were distributed during the festival, when Barrow was on hand to sign them. A few observant attendees noticed that Barrow had painted herself into the poster’s image: she is the woman in the foreground in the red floral print dress.

Once the National Book Festival became an annual event, so did the release of a festival poster. All of the National Book Festival posters are available through an online gallery on the festival’s website. Admirers may download digital copies for display on screens, or to print for display in homes, offices, classrooms, or libraries.

Now a yearly tradition, the National Book Festival continues to be funded by a variety of corporate sponsors and private donors who share with the Library of Congress a commitment to reading and literacy.

On September 8, 1900, hurricane winds estimated at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour ripped across the Texas coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, killing more than 6,000 people and decimating the city of Galveston. During the storm, water swept through sea-level streets; destroyed homes and buildings; and wiped out electricity, roads, and communication systems. As news of the disaster spread, supplies for the residents left homeless poured into Galveston from across the nation. Clara Barton and workers from the American National Red Cross arrived soon after the storm to help coordinate relief efforts.

Rebuilding Galveston involved constructing a reinforced concrete seawall and raising the city above sea level, to protect it against future flooding. Seventeen feet high, and initially over three miles long, the massive seawall, now extending over ten miles, repels Gulf winds and water. Sand from the Gulf of Mexico was used to lift the city far above its previous grade.

Not long after the storm, the governor of Texas, at the behest of local businesses, appointed a mayor and four commissioners to manage the city’s recovery. Initially viewed as an emergency measure, the commission form of government was in place in Galveston for roughly sixty years. The “Galveston Plan” was widely imitated by other cities and became, briefly, a model for early twentieth-century municipal reform.

The American Federation of Labor granted a charter to the Quarry Workers’ International Union of North America, headquartered in Barre, Vermont, on September 8, 1903. Granite had been quarried in Barre since just after the War of 1812. In the late nineteenth century, new waves of immigrants—mostly from the quarry districts of Europe, particularly Northern Italy and Scotland—came to Barre to quarry, cut, and carve the high-quality gray granite prevalent in the area. They brought a strong tradition of trade unionism to their new country.

Writers from the Federal Writers’ Project interviewed Barre quarrymen in the early 1940s and documented the lives of workers whose union standards outpaced the rest of the country. Many of these interviews are in the collection American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940 which is held by the Library’s Manuscript Division.

Take granite out of Barre, and it would be like taking the Capitol out of Montpelier.

[President of Barre Chamber of Commerce]. [ca. 1940]. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division

One of the workers’ chief concerns was stonecutters’ tuberculosis (silicosis), a debilitating and often deadly lung disorder caused by inhaling airborne granite particles produced by the pneumatic stone-working tools. Labor unions organized to insist that employers install dust-removing equipment. One Vermont granite worker explained, the workers were “pretty well resigned to their fate. These stonecutters expect that one day sooner or later they will get [stonecutters’ tuberculosis].” Interviewed in an era when workers’ rights were very narrowly construed, he recounted:

The big worry of some of [the quarrymen] is that they’ll die before they have made good provision for their families. That’s the real reason behind the strikes. They feel that since they’re ‘marked’ men with perhaps less time to provide for their families than the average man, that they are entitled to higher wages. Besides there are certain periods in the year – we call them slack time and dead time – when there is little work to be done. Sometimes only a few men work during these slow weeks; sometimes, none at all.

[Granite Worker]. Mary Tomasi, interviewer; The Granite Worker, publisher, Vermont, 1938. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division

Each stonecutter’s death was mourned by the community of laborers. Interviewer Mary Tomasi recounts the sadness Giacomo Coletti felt on the loss of his friend and fellow stonecutter Pietro:

Tonight he does not feel the wretched guilt that the news of Pietro’s death first brought him. It was Giacomo’s glowing letters (22 years ago) of excellent wages paid in America that persuaded Pietro to cross the ocean and learn this granite-cutting trade. These last two nights were an excruciating nightmare of thinking that if Pietro had stayed in the old country perhaps he would not now be lying dead from this stone-cutters’ TB. It took Nina and the children to convince him that the Dio’s will called Pietro from this world, and he would have been forced to answer had he been in Italy, Africa, or the very ends of the earth.

[Giacomo Coletti]. Mary Tomasi, interviewer; Montpelier, Vermont, 1938. American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936 to 1940. Manuscript Division