National Libraries Week: Preserving Liberty

“Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right. . . and a desire to know; but besides this, they have a right, and indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers.”
—John Adams*


Butterfly bookplate by Cavallini & Co. via TwoHandsPaperie

*from A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765). Quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of Political Quotations,edited by Antony Jay (Oxford University Press: New York, 1996) via ALA

Bookish Passion

“I want to see my wife and children every day, I want to see my grass and blossoms and corn ... But above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books."
-John Adams

Swedish bookplate for Arvid and Anna Thelin, 1914

Dare to Read

“Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.”
-John Adams

Thanks to Letterology
Belgian artist Armand Rels

Pocket Poet

“You will never be alone with a poet in your pocket.”
-John Adams

Bookplate of Rene Hoer Schelmann