A Capitol room, the fire of 1814 and Jefferson’s books in 1815.

The Library of Congress began as a line in a spending act. Wikipedia says the library was established on 24 April 1800, when President John Adams signed an act of Congress providing for the purchase of books “necessary for the use of Congress” and for fitting up a suitable room to hold them. The books were ordered from London, and Wikipedia says the opening collection of 740 books and three maps was kept in the new United States Capitol after Congress moved to Washington in November 1800.

Adams’s successor, Thomas Jefferson, shaped the institution early. Wikipedia says that on 26 January 1802 Jefferson signed a bill allowing the president to appoint the librarian of Congress and creating a Joint Committee on the Library to oversee it. In August 1814, during the War of 1812, British forces occupied Washington and burned several federal buildings, among them the Capitol, where Wikipedia says more than 3,000 of the library’s volumes were destroyed in the Senate wing.

Within a month Jefferson offered his own books as a replacement, and Congress accepted in January 1815, buying 6,487 books he had gathered over some fifty years. Wikipedia says the purchase doubled the size of the library and turned a legislative collection into a general one, because Jefferson’s shelves ran across many subjects and languages. He arranged them on Francis Bacon’s division of knowledge into Memory, Reason and Imagination, with 44 subdivisions, and the library kept that scheme until the late nineteenth century, when librarian Herbert Putnam introduced the Library of Congress Classification.

The collection suffered again on 24 December 1851, when a fire destroyed about 35,000 books, two-thirds of the collection and two-thirds of Jefferson’s transfer. Wikipedia says that by 2008 the library had found replacements for all but 300 of the documented Jefferson titles, and that a reconstruction of his library, assembled with privately raised funds, has been on permanent display in the Jefferson Building since 2008. Two changes in the 1860s set up the modern library: in 1866 the Smithsonian Institution transferred its non-scientific library of some 40,000 volumes, and in 1870 the library gained the right to receive two copies of every copyrightable work printed in the United States.

A competition won in 1873, a Beaux-Arts building opened in 1897.

Copyright deposits filled the Capitol rooms quickly, and Ainsworth Rand Spofford, who directed the library from 1865 to 1897, pressed Congress for a building of its own. Wikipedia’s article on the Thomas Jefferson Building says John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz won the competition for the plans in 1873, but the start was held up by congressional debate until a vote in 1886. Construction began in 1890.

The two architects did not both see it through. Wikipedia says Smithmeyer was dismissed in 1888 and Pelz became lead architect; Pelz was in turn replaced in 1892 by Edward Pearce Casey, son of Brigadier General Thomas Lincoln Casey of the Army Corps of Engineers, who was in charge of construction. The article names Pelz as the main designer, overseeing most of the exterior, and credits Casey and the superintendent of construction, Bernard Green, with completing the interiors and supervising the decorative programme.

The style is Beaux-Arts, in an elaborate Classical Revival dress. Wikipedia says the interiors gathered the work of classically trained American sculptors and painters, in symbolic programmes often set out by Spofford. On the second-floor portico facing the Capitol stand nine busts he chose, among them Demosthenes, Goethe, Benjamin Franklin and Dante, and the Court of Neptune Fountain fronts the entrance. The dome over the Main Reading Room was originally meant to stay under 70 feet; Casey and Green raised it to 195 feet and covered it in gold leaf.

The building opened to the public on 1 November 1897, with finishing work completed in 1898. Known originally as the Library of Congress Building or Main Building, it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 and renamed the Thomas Jefferson Building on 13 June 1980. Two more buildings followed on Capitol Hill: the Annex, approved in 1930 and opened on 3 January 1939, later named the John Adams Building, and the James Madison Memorial Building, built from 1971 to 1976, into which sections moved between 1980 and 1982. Online, the library’s digitisation began with American Memory in 1990, which became the National Digital Library programme in October 1994.

A bookcase logotype, two typefaces and a 2018 launch.

For a library, visual identity begins long before a logo. The library card is often the object a member carries every day, and its design sets the tone for every later contact, from the issue desk to the self-service kiosk. Inside the building, signage and wayfinding do much of the identity work: floor directories, shelf-end labels, room names and pictograms have to be legible at a glance, in several languages where needed, and consistent across reading rooms, stacks and children’s areas. Shelf classification is itself a visual system. Call numbers, subject bands and colour-coded spine labels turn an abstract scheme of knowledge into marks that readers learn to scan, and a well-ordered shelf can say as much about an institution as its letterhead.

The building often acts as the symbol. Many libraries are known by a facade, a reading room or a stair, and their graphics are built to sit alongside that architecture rather than compete with it, with restrained palettes and typefaces chosen for long texts and small sizes. The digital side now carries equal weight: the online catalogue, the app, the e-lending platform and the digitised collections need the same names, icons and tone as the signs in the hall, so that a search on a phone and a visit in person feel like one service. For library systems with many branches, identity becomes a framework, one shared name and set of rules that lets each local building keep its own character while remaining recognisably part of the network.

Bookends, a bookcase and a word set apart from its name.

The current identity came from Pentagram. Dezeen reported on 28 August 2018 that the firm’s New York office had updated the library’s visual identity with a shape-shifting logo resembling stacks of books and bookends on a shelf, led by principal Paula Scher. The magazine said the library’s leaders wanted to show more people that its collections were open to them; Scher told it that most Americans did not think they could use the library, or thought it was filled with government documents and law books, when it also held films, recorded music, sports ephemera and typefaces.

The lockup separates two words. Dezeen said “Library” is set in black Druk Condensed Super, while the full name “Library of Congress” runs in a smaller red Sharp Grotesk 20; Scher described “Library” as the big idea and “Library of Congress” as the facility, a deliberate distinction. The logo is meant as a metaphor for a bookshelf or bookcase and comes in several configurations, with the red name above, below or beside the black word, or with the bold word split in two and set either side of an image like a pair of bookends.

The system was planned to stretch. Dezeen listed books, the bimonthly LCM magazine, brochures, newsletters, signage and exhibition graphics among its uses, with a moving digital version online, and quoted Scher saying the identity came with a manual addressing everything the library makes. It replaced a logo by the New York firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv that showed a blue book patterned like the American flag, a mark Scher said looked governmental. The library planned to launch the new identity with the National Book Festival on 1 September 2018 and roll it out gradually.

For a design guide, the Library of Congress shows an identity built from its own furniture: one word as the bookends and the institution’s full name as the label on the shelf, set beside a gilded Beaux-Arts building of 1897. Compare the New York Public Library and Smithsonian guides. For this guide we use bookend black, Congress red, granite, gilt and reading-room cream with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Library of Congress’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.