BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Library of Congress -- Room: Main Reading Room (room itself)

DC -- Library of Congress -- Room: Main Reading Room (room itself):

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. LOCMRR_970811_01.JPG: Library Of Congress; Reading Room This is the main reading room in the Jefferson Building.
Multi Column: Number of columns of thumbnails to appear per page (normally defaults to 3): [1 col] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
Description of Subject Matter: THE MAIN READING ROOM

Visitors should take the elevators to the third floor to view the Main Reading Room from the Visitors' Gallery, or walk up the two flights of marble stairs.

The Eight Symbolic Statues and Their Inscriptions:

From the Visitors' Gallery, eight large statues can be seen above the giant marble columns that surround the reading room. They represent eight categories of knowledge, each considered symbolic of civilized life and thought. Their titles are inscribed in gilt letters on a tablet in the frieze below them. Beginning with the figures on the east side of the room--from the perspective of the Visitor's Gallery--the symbolic statues are: Philosophy, by Bela Lyon Pratt; Art, by Francois M.L. Tonetti-Dozzi (after sketches by Augustus St. Gaudens); History, by Daniel Chester French; Commerce, by John Flanagan; Religion, by Theodore Baur; Science, by John Donoghue; Law, by Paul Wayland Bartlett; and Poetry, by John Quincy Adams Ward.

Above each statue is a large tablet bearing an inscription in gilt letters. Each of the eight inscriptions, appropriate to the subject of the statue below it, was chosen by Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot.

Above the figure of Philosophy:
THE INQUIRY, KNOWLEDGE, AND BELIEF OF TRUTH
IS THE SOVEREIGN GOOD OF HUMAN NATURE.
Bacon, Essays, "Of Truth"

Above the figure of Art:
AS ONE LAMP LIGHTS ANOTHER, NOR GROWS LESS,
SO NOBLENESS ENKINDLETH NOBLENESS.
Lowell, Yussouf

Above the figure of History:
ONE GOD, ONE LAW, ONE ELEMENT, AND ONE FAR-OFF DIVINE EVENT,
TO WHICH THE WHOLE CREATION MOVES
Tennyson, In Memoriam

Above the figure of Commerce:
WE TASTE THE SPICES OF ARABIA YET NEVER FEEL
THE SCORCHING SUN WHICH BRINGS THEM FORTH.
Anon. [Dudley North, East India Trade]

Above the figure of Religion:
WHAT DOTH THE LORD REQUIRE OF THEE, BUT TO DO JUSTLY,
AND TO LOVE MERCY, AND TO WALK HUMBLY WITH THY GOD?
Holy Bible, Micah 6:8

Above the figure of Science:
THE HEAVENS DECLARE ...More...
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
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- 2021_DC_LOC_MRR: DC -- Library of Congress -- Room: Main Reading Room (room itself) (26 photos from 2021)
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Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Libraries] [Library of Congress (Everything)] [Library of Congress (Non-Events)] [US Capitol Complex]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints. The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].