In a few rather crowded rooms on the Firestone Library's C Floor, there is an alternate universe — one revolving around the public and private papers written and received by Thomas Jefferson during his lifetime.
The collection, titled "The Papers of Thomas Jefferson," has been gathered over a period of more than 60 years and published in multiple volumes by the Princeton University Press.
Headed by Barbara Oberg, a history professor and general editor of the collection, most of the editorial staff started work on the project six years ago.
The team of editors is currently working on the period leading up to the bitterly partisan election of 1800. Most of the work for the project entails annotating the papers and creating a context in which the collection can be understood.
"We're not medieval scribes who just transmit. It's not just reading a letter," Oberg said. "We have to see how the letters come in on each other. That's what makes this fun."
Papers are continually added to the collection as they arrive from private collections.
If the team does not already have a copy, it is accessioned, or given a number. At any given point in time, there are roughly 750 documents being examined.
And transcription is no easy process, as much of the handwriting — with the exception of Jefferson's crisp script — is difficult to decipher. After the documents are verified at the Library of Congress, they are shelved in Firestone's towering cabinets, which already contain 60,000 photocopied documents. Once the editorial staff completes the annotation of the papers, they are sent to press.
Each volume — the latest, No. 31, runs from Feb. 1, 1799 to May 31, 1800 — takes about a year to produce.
Those involved say editing the papers can be an exhilarating process.
"You get inside the mind of Jefferson," Oberg said.
The beginning
The University became the home of Jefferson's collection thanks to the efforts of Julian Parks Boyd, a University librarian and history professor who founded the project and served as its editor from its inception in 1943 until his death in 1980.
"Boyd and that generation of editors just assumed that this would be their career," Oberg said. "We've all been here for less than 10 years," she added.
The University collection contains very few originals of Jefferson's papers. The project mainly works with photocopies from major Jefferson collections at places such as the Library of Congress, Massachusetts Historical Society and University of Virginia.
Boyd conceived of the project in the early 1940s while serving as official historian of the Thomas Jefferson Bicentennial Commission and writing a book on the Declaration of Independence.
There was an emphasis during the Cold War on the ideals of early American history, Oberg said.
"They felt that we needed to know what the giants actually said," she explained.
Changing history
Most of the documents, sought out one by one, were gathered in the 1950s and photocopied. Many of the presidential papers, however, were not found until the 1980s, when they were located in the National Archives.
Boyd did not start out with the expectation that publishing the papers would take so much time.
"Boyd was an excellent scholar, but not a fast one," Princeton University Press Director Walter Lippincott said.
The papers were influential during a movement in American historiography toward using more primary sources.
The presentation of the first volume of the collection to President Harry Truman led the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to vastly expand its funding for American records.
If the papers' publication has had a lasting impact on historiography, the editorial staff's attitude has also changed with the times.
"Boyd absolutely adored [Jefferson]," Oberg said. "We're a lot less reverent than that generation of editors."
"We as historians are interested in very different things from what might have been written about 50 years ago," she added. "No one would have thought to annotate a casual reference to his maid Sally [Hemings, a slave rumored to be Jefferson's longtime lover] back then."
The future of the papers
Though Thomas Jefferson's papers were the first presidential documents to be published, they may also be among the last to be finished.
In 1998, the responsibility of editing papers from Jefferson's life after his presidency was given to the Monticello Foundation. The papers are not likely to be completed until 2026, though.
"This is a very prestigious project and we're proud we have it," Lippincott said. But, he added, this collection would never be published if the research were begun today.
Lippincott attributes this to a decline in the market for academic publishing over the last few decades.
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, however, are in no danger of being neglected.
The project will continue to be funded by a mixture of public and private sources, and plans are being made for the possible publication of several books on topics such as Jefferson and race, Jefferson and the government and a quotable Jefferson.
"It's kind of depressing that only 900 copies of this labor of scholarship are being purchased," Princeton University Press History Editor Brigitta von Rheinberg said. "This is a way to build on the wonderful scholarship we have, to try to reach a broader audience."
An electronic version of the papers has already been included in Electronic Enlightenment, a digital correspondence project started at the University of Oxford.
"People say that what they want is to see it on the web," Oberg said. "The book isn't going to go by the wayside, but electronic publication is a significant change."
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