Which library has the most books?

According to the American Library Association, there are an estimated 123,291 libraries of all kinds in the United States today. The Library of Congress, founded in Washington, D.C., in 1800, is both the oldest and largest library in the United States. On August 24, 1814, British troops burned the Capitol building (where the library was housed) and destroyed the library’s core collection of 3,000 volumes. The following year, Congress approved the purchase of statesman Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. Today, the Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 138 million items on approximately 650 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 32 million books and other print materials, 2.9 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.3 million maps, 5.5 million pieces of sheet music, and 61 million manuscripts.