“I cannot live without books.”

About this line

Jefferson was 72 when he wrote this, and he’d just done something remarkable: sold his personal library — nearly 6,500 volumes, the largest private collection in America — to Congress after the British burned the Capitol in 1814. The nation needed books more than he did. Within weeks of the sale, he was buying again. He wrote to Adams almost apologetically: he simply could not stop. The man who helped found a country on the power of ideas could not imagine a life without the ideas themselves.

Why we carry this line

He sold his library to help rebuild a nation’s collection of knowledge, and immediately started over. I understand that impulse completely. Any book lover does.

The design

"books." stands on end and reads top to bottom, the way a title reads down the spine of an American book. The word is the object. The italic lead sits at the head, and the attribution sits at the foot. A tote, a notebook cover and a mug all have a spine-shaped surface waiting for it.

The same design runs on the tee, the mug, the journal and the denim tote.

What happened next

Congress paid Jefferson $23,950 for 6,487 volumes in 1815. They became the new core of the Library of Congress, which sat inside the Capitol.

On Christmas Eve 1851, a faulty chimney flue started a fire there. It destroyed about 35,000 books, including nearly two-thirds of Jefferson’s. Only about 2,000 of his survived.

The Library has since been rebuilding his collection, one matching edition at a time. By 2008, it had found all but about 300 titles.