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(an act of vandalism so infuriating to Jefferson that he wanted to send American agents to London to set fire to landmarks there), and with it went the Congressional Library. Jefferson immediately, and generously, offered his own library to the nation “on whatever terms the Congress might think proper.” Jefferson thought he had about 10,000 books, but when a delegation from the federal government came to survey the collection, they found that the number was in fact 6,487. Worse, when they had a look at the books, they weren’t at all sure they wanted them. Many, they felt, were of no use to Congress, as they covered topics like architecture, wine making, cooking, philosophy, and art. About a quarter were in foreign languages, “which cannot be read,” the delegation noted grimly, while a good many more were of an “immoral and irreligious nature.” In the end, the congressmen allotted Jefferson $23,900 for the library—considerably less than half its value—and rather grudgingly took it away. Jefferson, as might have been expected, immediately embarked on building a new library, and had accumulated about a thousand new books by the time of his death the following decade.

Congress may not have been especially grateful for this windfall, but the purchase gave the infant United States the most sophisticated governmental library in the world and completely redefined such a library’s role. Government libraries previously had been mere reference rooms, designed for strictly utilitarian purposes, but this was to be a comprehensive, universal collection—an entirely different concept.

Today the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 115 million books and related items. Unfortunately, Jefferson’s part of it didn’t last long. Thirty-six years after the Jefferson library was purchased, early on a Christmas Eve morning, one of the chimneys in the Capitol library caught fire. Because it was early and a holiday, no one was around to notice the fire or check its spread. By the time the blaze was discovered and brought under control, most of the collection was destroyed, including Jefferson’s precious copy of I quattro libri.

The year of the fire, it almost goes without saying, was 1851.

• CHAPTER XIV •

THE STAIRS

I

We now come to the most dangerous part of the house—in fact, one of the most hazardous environments anywhere: the stairs. No one knows exactly how dangerous the stairs are, because records are curiously deficient. Most countries keep records of deaths and injuries sustained in falls, but not of what caused the falls in the first place. So in the United States, for instance, it is known that about twelve thousand people a year hit the ground and never get up again, but whether that is because they have fallen from a tree, a roof, or off the back porch is unknown. In Britain, fairly scrupulous stair-fall figures were kept until 2002, but then the Department for Trade and Industry decided that keeping track of these things was an extravagance it could no longer afford, which seems a fairly misguided economy, considering how much fall injuries cost society. The last set of figures indicated that a rather whopping 306,166 Britons were injured seriously enough in stair falls to require medical attention that year, so it is clearly more than a trifling matter.

John A. Templer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of the definitive (and, it must be said, almost only) scholarly text on the subject, The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, suggests that all fall-injury figures are probably severely underestimated anyway. Even on the most conservative calculations, however, stairs rank as the second most common cause of accidental death, well behind car accidents, but far ahead of drownings, burns, and other similarly grim misfortunes. When you consider how much falls cost society in lost working hours and the strains placed on health systems, it is curious that they are not studied more attentively. Huge amounts of money and bureaucratic time are invested in