The intention of this Handbook is to furnish such an account of the
new building of the Library of Congress as may prove of interest to
the general reader, and at the same time serve as a convenient guide
to actual visitors. To this latter end, a system of headings and
sub-headings has been introduced, and the building has been described
throughout in the order in which a visitor might naturally walk
through it. Criticism has been avoided in the general description,
but a brief survey of the artistic qualities of the Architecture,
Sculpture, and Painting is given in Mr. Caffin’s supplementary essay.
The writer had intended at first to give rather a full account of the
collections of the Library, of the Smithsonian system of exchange, of
the operation of the copyright law, and of the general system under
which the Library was carried on. So much of what he might have thus
described, however, would have been entirely changed, and so much
more considerably modified, by the new methods of administration made
possible and necessary by the new building, that it was decided to
pass lightly over all matters connected with the administration of
the Library. Should another edition of the Handbook be called for, it
is hoped that there will be an opportunity to supply this omission.
In the meantime it will be found that Mr. Spofford’s paper on the
Function of a National Library will serve to indicate the general
scope of the institution.
The writer desires to express his great obligation, for much
information and courtesy, to Mr. Bernard R. Green, in charge of the
Library during the time that this book was preparing, to Mr. Edward
Pearce Casey, and to Mr. Spofford. Without their assistance the book
could hardly have been written. Thanks are due, also, to many of the
individual artists for their courtesy in explaining the meaning and
application of their work--and in particular to Mr. Elmer E. Garnsey,
for a great deal of painstaking assistance.