Jefferson's bookshelf.

• Position: Literature - Thomas Jefferson - Brief article

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Have you ever gotten lost in the stacks? A bunch of Thomas Jefferson's books did. Researchers from the Jefferson Library at Monticello in Virginia recently discovered that 28 of the titles from the third President's "retirement" library--those he collected and read in the decade before he died in 1826--had been sitting on the shelves at Washington University in St. Louis since 1880 without anyone realizing they were once his. The university now ranks as the third largest repository of books belonging to Jefferson, after the Library of Congress in Washington and the University of Virginia. Jefferson Initialed these books (to claim ownership), corrected spelling errors, and occasionally wrote notes in the margins...