ABSTRACT
Visitors wishing to participate in the Library's concert series, attend its literary lectures, or see its exhibitions should go directly to the 1897 Jefferson Building. When a visitor tells a Washington cab driver, "Take me to the Library of Congress," the odds are that he or she will be deposited on a street corner across from the Capitol building with a casual, "There it is," and before said visitor can ask, "Where?" the cab will have sped away. If the visitor is a user of the Library in the same sense as a student approaching a campus library or a citizen going into the local public library, he should go into the great gray Jefferson Building—the Renaissance edifice with the green dome. Given conflicts and limited resources, Archibald MacLeish tended to embrace anything that improved the Library as an institution, and if he favored an elite, it was the cultural elite and the press.
