THE GEORGE WASHINGTON NATIONAL LIBRARY

I was in D.C. this week at a library conference, where I gave a paper Friday on the topic of “Coinage, Politics, and Power: Preservation grants at the library of the American Numismatic Society.”

I had the opportunity to spend the day Thursday at George Washington's Mount Vernon and got a tour of the library from the head librarian and archivist, Mark Santangelo. (Mark was previously the long-time librarian of the Greek and Roman Art department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is where we became friends, as I also worked there for 3 years).

Mark has been at Mount Vernon since 2012 and oversaw the construction and opening of the new library there, which is absolutely beautiful. I’m attaching some photos from my visit: there is a reading room with a lot of natural light, a nice rare book room (which includes two cases of Washington medals!) with collections that include letters of George and Martha Washington, books from Washington’s original library, among many other treasures.

The last photo is Mark standing in front of a portion of Washington’s original library and a sculptural enlarged version of Washington’s bookplate (which appears in volumes from his collections). One of the treasures of the collections is George Washington’s copy of Acts Passed at Congress… (1789) , which sold at a Christie’s auction in June 2012 for almost $10 million! Visitors can purchase a beautiful facsimile copy of this work at the bookstore.

www.christies.com/lotfinder/books-manuscripts/
washington-george-president-united-states-first-congress
-5584777-details.aspx

Items in the library are searchable in their online library catalog, and anyone familiar with the ANS library catalog will find a lot of similarities (they use the same library system called Koha):

librarycatalog.mountvernon.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-search.pl?
q=coin&x=-559&y=-728

There is a lot of information on their website so I’ll include some links here and encourage readers to reach out to Mark if interested!

www.mountvernon.org/library
www.mountvernon.org/library/staff

As a final note, it makes a fun day trip from D.C. as it is only about a 30 minute drive from the city in a very scenic area of Virginia and you can also tour Mount Vernon itself, which is steps away from the library.

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web