Small Gerbert (1 results)

Soft cover. Condition: Very Good. 1st Edition. Compiled by Herbert Small; translated by V. A. Davydov. Published by G. V. Yudin with the permission of Curtis & Cameron in Boston. Description of the New Library of Congress in Washington stands as a rare and telling publication from the turn of the twentieth century, created at the moment when the Library of Congress was taking on its grand, now-iconic architectural form. The text outlines the design of the building, its interior decoration, the symbolic programme of its murals and statuary, and the arrangement of its reading rooms and collections. It captures the institution at the very beginning of its modern life, preserving a detailed portrait of what would grow into one of the world s most significant libraries. Its historical value is heightened by its connection to Grigory Yudin, the Siberian merchant and bibliophile responsible for assembling one of the largest private libraries in the Russian Empire. In the early twentieth century Yudin sold his collection over 80,000 volumes to the Library of Congress. This was one of the most substantial acquisitions of Russian and East-European material ever made by an American institution. Distinguished for its breadth, rarity and the consistently high quality of its copies, the Yudin Library became the foundation of the Library of Congress s Slavic Division and remains at its core to this day. At the time the book was issued, the Library of Congress itself was entering a new chapter. Founded in 1800, it had recently moved into the richly adorned Thomas Jefferson Building, with its mosaics, frescoes and sculptural programme conceived as a civic temple of knowledge. The publication records this early phase, before the collections had grown to the vast scale tens of millions of items that characterises the institution now. This particular copy shows a sympathetic restoration to the upper right corner of the front wrapper, with a discreet repair to the spine. Latvian library stamps on the verso of the title-page have been cancelled by the library itself. Apart from these minor traces of its journey, it remains a clean and bright example of a scarce work documenting the early life of a major cultural institution.