The World's Largest Library Has 170 Million Items — and Adds 12,000 New Ones Every Day

The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., is the largest library in the world. As of 2024, it holds approximately 170 million items across 470 languages, including:

• 40+ million books
• 3.7 million sound recordings
• 15.4 million photographs
• 5.5 million maps
• 72 million manuscripts
• 1.8 million moving images (films and videos)
• The original drafts of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution
• One of three remaining perfect-vellum Gutenberg Bibles
• The personal libraries of Thomas Jefferson, Sigmund Freud, and Bob Hope

Daily Operations

• ~12,000 items received per business day through copyright registration alone
• ~3 million items processed per year
• The library has 838 miles of bookshelves
• Three buildings in Washington, plus an enormous off-site storage facility in Fort Meade, Maryland
• Over 3,000 staff members

Famous Treasures

• The original Gutenberg Bible (one of three vellum copies)
• Lincoln's papers, including a draft of the Gettysburg Address
• The world's largest collection of comic books (140,000+)
• The world's most comprehensive recorded music collection
• A 4,000-year-old Sumerian cuneiform tablet

Other Massive Libraries

• British Library, London: ~150 million items
• National Library of China: ~38 million items, growing rapidly
• Russian State Library, Moscow: ~47 million items
• National Diet Library, Japan: ~44 million items

Could Anyone Read It All?

Reading every book at the Library of Congress at the rate of one book per day would take approximately 110,000 years. Reading every item — including manuscripts, recordings, and films — would take longer than the age of Homo sapiens as a species.