Sewing Room in the Congressional Library, Preparing Books for New Bindings, 1919-1920

This photograph from the early 1920s shows one of the bookbinding rooms in the Library of Congress. In these rooms--hidden on the library's lower floors--bookbinders repaired old and worn volumes. They also bound newspapers and created durable library works from books and pamphlets with flimsy paper covers. Not an easy task for one of the world's largest repositories of recorded knowledge.