From the NY Times (3.7.04) in The Sophisticated Traveller, in an article called: "Washington: Some of My Favorite Things":

And yet the reading room is only a fraction of the pleasure of the Jefferson Building, a late-19th-century fantasy of civilization elaborately painted and adorned with miles of chubby marble putti. Its symbolic murals, often kitschy and sometimes only moderately adept, bespeak the idealism upon which the library was founded: after an initial collection of books was burned by the British in 1814, the Library of Congress was rebuilt using Thomas Jefferson's private library, which he sold to Congress for $23,950; and in keeping with Jefferson's principles, was devoted from the first to a belief in a universal scope. The echoing marble hallways are overseen by dancing nymphs and hard-working peasants and representations of Minerva, and stand as a reminder of an America -- perhaps always only an ideal; and yet a worthy one -- united in its study of literature, history, philosophy and science rather than of Britney Spears and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Around the corner from the Jefferson Building is the smaller, but no less remarkable, Folger Shakespeare Library, where public tours are also available, and where literary and theatrical events take place throughout the year in the replica Elizabethan theater. This library, unlike its neighbor, is a tribute more to flourishing capitalism than to democracy per se: like many of Washington's most enticing corners, it was the philanthropic gift from the wealthy to the public, made in the early part of the 20th century. In this case, Henry Clay Folger (born 1857), sometime president and chairman of the board of Standard Oil of New York, and his wife, Emily Jordan Folger, set about collecting Shakespeare quartos and folios and other rare books and manuscripts from their relative youth: Folger's first rare purchase -- of a copy of the fourth folio of Shakespeare's plays -- was made around 1889. By the time of World War I, the Folgers were scouting for a site for their library and chose the land next to the Library of Congress; and in 1928 Congress passed a resolution allowing the library's construction.

This elegant but apparently modest structure, of neo-Classical marble on the outside with a Tudor interior (such is the strange modern fakery of much of the city), was finally established in 1932, two years after Henry Clay Folger's unexpected death. It houses not only the much-used and appreciated Elizabethan theater -- an inviting den of paneling and archways -- but also a capacious Elizabethan-style reading room, where scholars work at long tables, and in which sits a copy of the bust of Shakespeare from his grave at Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon, along with, somewhat more alarmingly, the ashes of the Folgers themselves. For the public, and for formal functions, an imposing paneled exhibition hall displays items from the collections.

The library's greatest secrets are subterranean, however, and while Folger-affiliated scholars and some privileged visitors may have the opportunity to visit the vaults (as I once did, thanks to the generosity of the PEN association), they are not -- alas, but understandably -- open to the general public. The library holds more than 250,000 volumes, including an extraordinary 229 Shakespeare quartos, 79 first folios and 118 second, third and fourth folios. The low-ceilinged, climate-controlled, heavily vaulted stacks, redolent of book must and Freon in equal measure, contain treasure upon treasure along their deceptively ordinary metal shelves, the fruit of two amateur collectors' passions and the careful management of their successors.

By Claire Messud