Produced by Donald Cummings, Adrian Mastronardi, John Campbell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.) TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE Italic text is denoted by _underscores_. Bold text is denoted by =equal signs=. Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been placed at the end of the book. Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book. [Illustration: THE NEW LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.] HANDBOOK OF THE NEW LIBRARY OF CONGRESS COMPILED BY HERBERT SMALL _WITH ESSAYS ON THE_ ARCHITECTURE, SCULPTURE AND PAINTING BY CHARLES CAFFIN AND ON THE FUNCTION OF A NATIONAL LIBRARY BY AINSWORTH R. SPOFFORD [Illustration: (colophon)] BOSTON CURTIS & CAMERON 1897 COPYRIGHT 1897 BY CURTIS & CAMERON THE HEINTZEMANN PRESS BOSTON PREFACE. 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. H. S.