The great majority of the Founding Fathers were readers. In fact, the leading political figures of late eighteenth-century America were generally, and often intimately, acquainted with the output of the greatest European minds of the day--and of the minds of the ancient western world. Two factors above all placed an ineffaceable stamp on the reading habits of the American revolutionaries: (1) the prevailing mode of their education was rigorous, classical, and thoroughly book-oriented; and (2) the political and social upheaval of which they were the architects and beneficiaries caused them to consult the experience of the past to make sense of their current tribulations and to guide them in their epic task of nation-building. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, two of the most intellectual of the Founding Fathers, took extraordinary pains to create not just serviceable personal libraries but collections of superlative quality. Most noteworthy about the Founding Fathers' reading habits was their tendency to regard books not as ornaments but as tools. The Founding Fathers were readers, collectors, users, and creators of books. A few of them went further and became founders of institutional libraries. Through books, they sought both knowledge and self-knowledge, the means by which better to live. (RS)