Has anyone ever thought of building a private library that contains the published works of all thirteen Librarians of Congress? This unusual collecting approach would certainly make for some interesting biblio-bedfellows. You would have George Watterston's Easy Method of Learning the Roman History.... next to Herbert Putnam's The National Library; Some Recent Developments.... next to L. Quincy Mumford's Catalog of the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana in the Library of Congress....
Assuming you were extremely diligent in building such a collection, you eventually would find that your shelves mostly contained the works of but two of those thirteen gentlemen (no females have yet served as Librarian of Congress, despite the fact that the library profession has long been stereotyped as a feminine profession).
The better known of the above two gentlemen (at least to the general public) would be the historian Daniel J. Boorstin, who served as Librarian of Congress from 1975-1987. Among Boorstin's almost two dozen books are the trilogy The Americans (which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize) and The Discoverers, which won the History of Science Society's Watson Davis Prize:
The other gentleman whose books would fill your shelves also won a few awards: a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play; a National Book Award; the Bollingen Prize in Poetry; two Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry; and an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Yet this Librarian of Congress is all but unknown to the general public today.
Tomorrow, we will look at the legacy of Archibald MacLeish....
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