Book Lists

I'm realizing that I don't know a whole lot about Thomas Jefferson, or, 'TJ' for short. One thing I am learning is that Jefferson kept a lot of lists. I've been introduced to several of Jefferson's book lists as well as later recreations of his lists in the course of my work so far at the Jefferson Library: the Wythe list, the 1783 list, the Trist list, and Sowerby's catalog. Something compelled Thomas Jefferson to begin to keep lists of the books he owned, including those he wanted to acquire. He organized titles by subject, influenced by Bacon's knowledge categories: Memory, Reason, and Imagination. Jefferson renamed these History, Philosophy, and Fine Arts. I'm not sure the ends to which Jefferson used his lists, and whether or not others accessed them, but clearly they would have been useful taxonomies for navigating his libraries. It is fascinating to view the manuscript images of some of these lists and witness the process of Jefferson's classification in his own hand-- items are struck through and written over, rubbed out and written anew, etc., and titles are accompanied by marks of various meaning. Jefferson's subject-based catalog accompanied his sale of books to the Library of Congress in 1815. Classification schemes lend order to things, help us navigate them, and let us derive meaning from them. I'm trying to let it all sink in at the moment with TJ and his lists without getting too hung up on needing to know everything.