April 24th, Wednesday

On this day in 1800 President John Adams allocated $5000 for the Library of Congress to accumulate “books as may be necessary for the use of Congress” and for the construction of a building to house those books and documents. The original collection included 740 books and three maps.

The Library of Congress was torched during the War of 1812, just over a decade after its establishment. President Thomas Jefferson graciously offered to sell his collection of over six thousand books to the Library…for nearly $24,000. Despite the hefty price tag, it was an important step in the Library’s history. Jefferson’s collection was not just scholarly books but included the likes of items such as cookbooks and contemporary literature. Despite some critics arguing that such frivolous items should not be in the government Library, Jefferson overruled them, believing that there were “no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”

Despite another fire in 1851 that claimed 35,000 items, the Library carried on. They now have a current collection of more than 164 million items- not just books and maps, but music, paintings, recordings, video, prints, and more.

In 1990 the Library began work on a project called “American Memory” with the goal of digitizing its collection. At first everything was to go on CDs and DVDs, but wit the advent of the internet, that was abandoned. You can now find 7 petabytes (7,000 thousand terabytes, or 7,000,000 gigabytes) of the Library of Congress’s collections online at www.loc.gov.

Today is the birthday of Japanese botanist Tomitaro Makino. He was raised by his grandmother in the town of Sakawa in Southern Japan. His magnum opus is Makino’s Book of Botany in which he classifies 6000 species in six volumes, but his text Makino’s Illustrated Flora of Japan was more prominent and is still used as a reference book today. Over Makino’s lifespan he named 2500 plants and amassed a collection of 400,000 specimens, all of which were donated at his passing to the Tokyo Metropolitan University. The Botanical Garden in Kochi, near his hometown, is named in Makino’s honor.

And today is the birthday of David Blackwell. Blackwell was an African-American mathematician and professor whose work in game theory, coding theory, information theory, and probability theory I will not attempt to explain. In an interview a few years before his retirement from UC Berkley, Blackwell said “I’m not interested in doing research and I never have been… I’m interested in understanding, which is quite a different thing.”

And today is the birthday of English writer Anthony Trollope. Trollope worked as a postal employee before his writing career took off. He stuck to a strict writing schedule to make sure he was producing, sometimes writing during the lengthy train-rides he had to take for work.

It was his Barsetshire novels that really put Trollope on the map for readers and allowed him to eventually leave his postal office position to devote time to writing and other pursuits. His 47 novels generally all contain sly commentary on society and politics, but also happy endings for the good guys and justice for the bad guys.

Today is also the birthday of Elizabeth Goudge, best-selling author of children’s books. Her book The Little White Horse won a Carnegie Medal in Britain for children’s books in 1946. She wrote sixteen books and many more short stories. Of her last book, The Child from the Sea, she said “I seemed to give it all I have to give…and so I know I can never write another novel, for I do not think there is anything else to say.”