purple motes

Hard-working volunteers have recently entered Thomas Jefferson's personal library into LibraryThing. The U.S. Congress purchased Jefferson's library in 1815 to replace to the library Congress lost when the British Army burned the Capitol in 1814.[1] Thus Jefferson's library on LibraryThing documents the library that formed Congress's new library in 1815.

Although Jefferson was at the forefront of intellectual and political life of his time, his library contained rather old books. In 1815, 90% of his library books were printed more than a decade earlier. Half of his library books were printed more than 35 years earlier, that is, prior to 1779. In terms of Jefferson's life (he was 72 years old in 1815), half the books in his library were printed before he reached 36 years of age. The formation of the U.S., the French Revolution, the rapid growth in book production, and Jefferson's two terms as president did not put a large share of books into his library.[2]

Jefferson's books were old in relation to movements in the book trade. In the U.S. at the beginning of the nineteenth century, book sellers kept a print edition for sale for perhaps a decade.[3] In both Britain and the U.S., book production, particularly that of fiction, grew strongly relative to macroeconomic trends from about 1780. In contrast, the number of books per publication year in Jefferson's library trends downward from the mid 1780s.

The publication dates of books in Jefferson's library indicate that as he grew older, he acquired a larger share of books addressing current affairs and applied technology. The table below gives the median publication dates of Jefferson's books by book categories. Apart from newspapers, agriculture formed the most current category. That's consistent with Jefferson's interest in fostering an agricultural nation of yeoman farmers. The most dated category consisted of ecclesiastical law and history. Human efforts to build a city of God did not interest Jefferson. His library also show relatively little interest in new developments in poetry and fine arts (Romanticism) and in fiction (novels). Jefferson, in short, was a founding policy wonk.

Compared to when it purchased books for its library in 1800, Congress paid a higher price for older books when it purchased Jefferson's library. In 1800, Congress paid $2.97 per book for 740 books that it purchased from a London bookseller. This price includes the cost of packaging and shipping the books from London. The bookseller wrote:

we earnestly hope the books will arrive perfectly safe, great care having been taken in packing them. We judged it best to send trunks rather than boxes, which after their arrival would have been of little or no value. Several of the books sent were only to be procured second-handed, and some of them, from their extreme scarcity, at very advanced prices. We have in all cases sent the best copies we could obtain and charged the lowest prices possible.[4]

In 1815, Congress paid Jefferson $3.69 per volume for 6487 volumes, plus at least an additional $0.10 per volume for packing and shipping from Monticello, Virginia.[5] Adjusted for inflation, this price is about 20 cents higher per volume than the price per volume for the books purchased in 1800. Apparently all but several of the books purchased in 1800 were new books, which probably means that they had been printed within the previous decade. In contrast, 90% of Jefferson's books were printed more than a decade earlier.

Older, higher priced books are not necessarily worse than newer, lower-priced books. Older books might be more scarce than newer books, and hence more valuable. Book prices varied greatly depending on the size of the book, the quality of its binding, the paper used, and engravings included in the book. Average price and median age are important descriptions of a collection of books, not inverse measures of the attractiveness of purchasing a collection.

Congress's purchase of Jefferson's library was quite controversial. One Congressman opposed the bill to purchase the Jefferson's library with this argument:

the library contained irreligious and immoral books, works of the French philosophers, who caused and influenced the volcano of the French Revolution, which had desolated Europe and
extended to this country. [The Congressman stated that he] was opposed to a general dissemination of that infidel philosophy, and of the principles of a man [Jefferson] who had inflicted greater injury on our country than any other, except Mr. Madison. The bill would put $23,900 into Jefferson's pocket for about 6,000 books, good, bad, and indifferent, old, new, and worthless, in languages which many can not read, and most ought not; which is true Jeffersonian, Madisonian philosophy, to bankrupt the Treasury, beggar the people, and disgrace the nation.[6]

Representatives also put forward less partisan reasons for not approving the bill to purchase the library:

Others, among whom were a number of the political and personal friends of Mr. Jefferson, opposed the bill on the ground of the scarcity of money, and the necessity of appropriating it to purposes more indispensable than the purchase of a library; the probable insecurity of such a library placed here; the high price to be given for this collection; its miscellaneous and almost exclusively literary (instead of legal and historical) character, etc. [7]

The bill to purchase Jefferson's library was narrowly approved: 81 votes for, 71 votes against.

The accumulation of knowledge doesn't happen automatically. Jefferson's library testifies to the personal effort and political controversy associated with accumulating knowledge in the early nineteenth-century. Many signs in the twenty-first century indicate that personal effort and political controversies remain at the center of knowledge accumulation.

Additional data notes:

I calculated the publication year statistics given above by extracting the Jefferson library from LibraryThing, cleaning it slightly, and recoding the (first) category for each book. Here's a year-by-year summary of the publication dates and book counts. For more detail, here are the individual records with the tab-delimited fields author, title, publication year, original category, and recoded category. For records that included a publication year range, the year in this dataset is the average of the given range. For years that included a "-" (such as "178-"), I've replaced the dash was the midpoint of the dashed range. The recoded categories are historically appropriate terms, but are not necessarily consistent with Jefferson's hierarchical organization of categories.

The dataset excludes 101 records that do not include a publication year. These records do not appear to have a strong publication-year bias. Given the large total number of dated records (4788), excluding a 102-record sample with even some date bias probably wouldn't effect aggregate statistics much. Note, however, that the LibraryThing Jefferson stat page gives an average publication year of 1754. I calculate an average year of 1756. If the LibraryThing average uses a zero-value for records with no publication year, that might account for the lower LibraryThing average.

The median is a more easily interpretable summary statistic for publication years. The average can depend significantly on a few outliers, e.g. a few very old books. I suggest that LibraryThing replace on its member stat page the "average" publication year line with a "50% of your books were printed before" line.

As with any data source, you should cross-check and evaluate the datasets I have shared for possible mistakes. Sharing data helps to advance knowledge, and I encourage everyone to do so.

More historical data on libraries.

Reference notes:

[1] Some evidence indicates that many books were not destroyed in the fire, but were lost after being removed from the building in 1814. See Johnston (1904) pp. 66-7. For another example of losing valuable federal government property in a nineteenth century fire, see this discussion of the Smithsonian fire of 1865.

[2] When Jefferson was President, he suggested books to be purchased for the library of Congress. See Johnston (1904) p. 37. Thus government purchases may have substituted for Jefferson's personal purchases. Note also that some of Jefferson's books may not have been included in the library he sold to Congress in 1815. Jefferson described his library as containing "between nine and ten thousand volumes." See Johnston (1904) p. 70. The library he sold to Congress consisted of 6,487 volumes.

[3] Amory (2000) p. 198.

[4] Johnston (1904) p. 24, quoting a letter apparently from Cadell & Davies, the London bookseller. See id. pp. 24-5 for the total cost. The items procured for that sum probably also included three maps.

[5] On packing and shipping costs, see id. p. 104.

[6] Id. p. 86, quoting Representative Cyrus King of Massachusetts.

[7] Id., general text. Some argued that Jefferson's library was worth $50,000; others stated that such a library "might be bought in any of the large cities for half the money."

References:

Amory, Hugh (2000) "A Note on Imports and Domestic Production," in Hugh Amory and David D. Hall, The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Johnston, William Dawson (1904), History of the Library of Congress : volume I, 1800-1864 (Washington: GPO).

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Radiohead's offering of its new music has two parts. One part, a pay-what-you-will digital download, has the blogsphere abuzz. The second, less noted, part of Radiohead's offering is, for £40, a discbox:

This consists of the new album, In Rainbows, on CD and on 2 x 12 inch heavyweight vinyl records. A second, enhanced CD contains more new songs, along with digital photographs and artwork. The discbox also includes artwork and lyric booklets.
All are encased in a hardback book and slipcase.

Radiohead's discbox illustrates different physical instantiations of music. The availability of digital downloads does not necessarily imply that sellers of music must sell only one standard bitstream. Music fans will embed digital downloads into a wide variety of devices customized in a huge number of ways. Music makers can create additional value by supporting a wide range of representations and uses of their music.

Book publishers have long recognized the importance of different physical presentations of the same book. One important issue was the size of the book. A large size (a quarto or octavo) indicated a weighty, luxury work. A small size that could fit into a pocket or purse (duodecimo) was meant to be taken as light reading.

Book bindings contributed significantly to the value of books. In late-eighteenth century England, books were typically sold unbound. Readers chose whether and how to augment, bind, and personalize the book. Book-binding and related crafts were an important business.

Book purchasers had many choices for binding their books. At the top end, books were bound in goat skin (Morocco binding). Bibliographic information might be inscribed in gilt on the front cover and the spin of the book, the page edges might be cleanly cut and painted with an ornate design, and marbled end-pages might be added. In addition, an elaborately designed bookplate (ex-libris) often was pasted inside the cover of expensively bound books. Other bindings types included (ordered by decreasing cost) full-calf, half-calf, sheep, cloth, cardboard, and paper.

Publishers of cheap novels ("dime novels") in the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century used book size, binding style, and illustrations to market the same text to different customer groups. One strategy was to print a series of small-total-page, paperback novels that could be mailed under the relatively cheap rate for periodicals. Another strategy was to use colored covers to make cheap paperbacks stand out on the newsstands where they were sold.[1] In the second half of the nineteenth century, many dime novels were published multiple times:

Over the years, the stories were not changed at all -- they did not become more sensational, or more violent, or less puritanical over the years, as the standard narrative of the dime novel genre would have it. What did change was the format in which they were published, how much they cost, and where they were purchased. [1]

Inability to assert successfully exclusive publication rights increases the important of product design and distribution. In 1892, when Houghton, Mifflin & Company's copyright on The Scarlet Letter expired, Houghton, Mifflin increased the number of editions of The Scarlet Letter to at least eight. A low-cost edition was the paper-bound "Salem Edition," costing 15 cents. At the luxury end of the offerings was a $7.50 large-paper, vellum-bound '"Riverside Edition" illustrated with photogravures of specially made drawings.[2] With the text of The Scarlet Letter in the public domain, publishers created value through book design and distribution.

Unimaginative marketing is more of a threat to the music business than is illegal music sharing.

[1] Erickson, Paul (1999) "Help or Hindrance? The History of the Book and Electronic Media," pp. 2-3.

[2] Winship, Michael (2001) "Hawthorne and the 'Scribbling Women': Publishing the Scarlet Letter in the Nineteenth-Century United States," Studies in American Fiction, v. 29, pp. 8-9.

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Digital forms and ubiquitous networks are greatly increasing opportunities to circulate authored symbolic works. Digitization projects are creating huge online libraries of digitized books that persons around the world can access at zero incremental cost. Storage prices are dropping so rapidly that one small device will soon be able to store all the music that most persons listen to throughout their lives. Video sharing sites are collecting and distributing large amounts of video across the Internet. Many persons can now easily create a huge library of digital works. How persons respond to vastly expanding access to works will significantly shape the communications industry.

To understand better the circulation of works, consider U.S. public-library users’ book-borrowing behavior since the mid-nineteenth century. Measured relative to the unskilled wage, the dime novels that Irwin Beadle began selling in 1860 were almost five times more expensive than the twenty-five cent paperbacks being sold in 1950. A lower real purchase price for books increased the incentive to purchase rather than borrow. Average time spent reading, according to the best available estimates, fell 50% from 1925 to 1995. Less time spent reading implies less demand for borrowing books.

Other factors probably pushed toward more borrowing. The number of books in print, and the number of books in libraries, increased immensely from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. Perhaps such a change encouraged persons to read a larger number of books less thoroughly, and hence favored borrowing books relative to purchasing books. Library users’ travel costs, in time and money, probably fell with improvements in transportation technology since the mid-nineteenth century. Lower travel costs reduce the total cost of borrowing books from a library.

Library book circulation per user has no strong, long-run trend. From 1856 to 1978, library users borrowed from U.S. public libraries about 15 books per user per year. From 1978 to 2004, book circulation per user declined approximately 50%. The growth of audiovisuals circulation, estimated at 25% of total circulation in 2004, accounts for about half of this decline. These figures depend on estimates and disparate samples of libraries with varying circulation and user accounting methods. Nonetheless, these figures are of sufficient quality to suggest that historically established institutions significantly stabilize borrowing behavior.

Users borrowing items from public libraries has plausible connections to a variety of institutions and values. Much of the pleasure from reading comes from discussing a book with friends who have also read the book. The desire to discuss books among friends may constrain the rate at which individuals will read books. At the same time, persons may value going to the library as an activity in itself. Borrowing library items may be in part a by-product of interest in those visits. On the supply side, libraries can counterbalance changing demand for books by shifting the distribution of book collections between popular and less popular works, by changing investments in promoting book borrowing, and by shifting collections from books to audiovisuals.

Media use that is connected to wider scope of behaviors and interests is likely to change more slowly. The shifts in music from vinyl records, to CDs, and then to digital downloads were format changes that required relatively small changes in behavior. Persons who read the same newspaper every morning while using the bathroom, or who watch a half-hour television news program every evening before dinner, have their media use connected to relatively stable patterns of life. Generational changes in patterns of life, rather than changes in relative prices, quality, or features, are more important for such media use. Established institutions, meaning both routine patterns of personal activity and indefinitely chartered organizations, can give media use considerable stability despite major changes in activity incentives and technological possibilities.

Note: Post edited and updated. For sources and data, see Book Circulation Per U.S. Public Library User Since 1856 (also on SSRN).

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Irving Wladawsky-Berger observes that watching a film, compared to reading a novel, seems to deliver similar goods at less cost:

Given my utter inability to keep up with all the work and general interest material I'd like to read, I find it very satisfying to be able to enjoy a film in a couple of hours or so, as opposed to the many hours it would take me to read a novel.

I realize how different films and novels are, the latter usually being able to deal with characters and stories in significantly more depth than the former. But I still wonder if there is something about the visual and multimedia nature of films that permits them to tell a story in a couple of hours that would take significantly longer to read. Could it be that one of the reasons for the relative compactness of films is the fact that they are reaching our brains through a variety of channels, including the broader visual ones?

The traditional concept of sensory channels tends to obscure cross-sensory and forward stimulation effects. But this is a good example of how one sensory form can tell stories more efficiently than another sensory form.

In an analysis of a different sensory effect, I've estimated the ratio of personal photographs to words of telephone conversation over the past century. These estimates suggest that a picture is worth about twelve thousand words. Keep that in mind when you're blogging!

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