"The Choice of Books": Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the Ideology of Reading, and Literary Collections at the Library of Congress in the 1870s

Abstract

Ainsworth Rand Spofford was no fan of what he called the grassy incubations of Walt Whitman. As a thirty-five-year-old newspaper editor in Cincinnati in 1860, Spofford criticized Whitman's poetry on various grounds, including incoherence and indecency: What we complain of in Walt Whitman, aside from that gross and obtrusive animalism which disgusts all intellectual men, is his utter contempt for expression, and the formless and apparently aimless character of his productions.1 With these comments in mind, it is surprising to find Librarian of Congress Spofford writing to Whitman sixteen years later, asking him to confirm that the six editions of Leaves of Grass held by the Library of Congress were indeed all of the authorized editions.2 Though Whitman's reputa tion steadily rose through the late nineteenth century, Spofford had not changed his opinion of the poet's work: he pointedly left Whit man's name out of some original verses celebrating American literary authors in 1900.3 The narrative that emerges from these events would tend to valorize Spofford as a visionary librarian who put aside his per sonal taste in the interest of establishing the Library of Congress as a national library with comprehensive collections. The centerpiece of his collection-building efforts, of course, was the copyright deposit law of 1870, which secured for the Library all publications of the American press submitted for copyright protection. My intention in this essay is not to challenge this narrative but to complicate it. Spofford deserves immense credit for the copyright deposit law as well as for his long campaign for a building whose gran deur would be commensurate with the institution's status as a de facto