A glimpse of Thomas Jefferson's library at his home, Monticello
Alex Wong/Getty Images  "I cannot live without books," declared
U.S. President Thomas Jefferson to his friend John Adams.
Indeed, Jefferson was an obsessive book collector from a young
age, amassing three separate home libraries in his lifetime. The
first collection was destroyed when his family home burned down
in 1770. Jefferson wrote to a friend that he would have felt
less grief to lose the money he had spent on the books than he
did losing the books themselves [source: Monticello].  When the
Library of Congress was destroyed in the War of 1812, Jefferson
sold his second collection of about 6,000 books to the federal
library [source: Library of Congress]. Jefferson's library was
considered the finest in the country, and his collection doubled
the holdings of the Library of Congress. Still, Jefferson didn't
let the shelves at Monticello sit empty. By the time he died 11
years later, he had more than 2,000 volumes in his library
[source: Stant