"American Treasures of the Library of Congress," an unprecedented rotating exhibition of the rarest and most significant items from the Library's collections relating to America's past, opened May 1. It is the first time that the treasures, drawn from every corner of the world's largest library, have been assembled on such a grand scale.

When Abraham Lincoln was shot at Ford's Theatre in Washington on April 14, 1865, he was carrying two pairs of spectacles and a lens polisher, a pocket-knife, a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, and a brown leather wallet containing a five-dollar Confederate note and nine newspaper clippings. Given to Lincoln's son Todd upon his death, these everyday items, now relics, came to the Library in 1937.

A unique sampling of rare books, music, manuscripts, maps, photos, drawings, audio selections and video clips will give visitors a firsthand look at a cross section of the vast repository that has been called "America's Memory."

Highlights of the exhibition include many "firsts": the first extant book printed in America, the first photographic portrait of a human face, a photograph of the first flight; the first baseball card, the first telegraph message, a drawing of the first telephone and a written account of the first phone call, the first motion picture deposited for copyright, and others.

The permanent exhibition, made possible by a grant of $1.1 million from the Xerox Foundation, is the centerpiece of a yearlong celebration marking the official reopening of the Library's Thomas Jefferson Building during its 100th anniversary year (see related stories in this issue).

The Xerox Foundation is supporting the preservation of many of the items in the show, so that they may be displayed safely. In addition, the Foundation has underwritten the construction of a self-contained display case (see story), with the most advanced environmental and security technology, for the Library's "top treasures." One such treasure, Thomas Jefferson's rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, in his own hand with revisions by Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, will be on display through July 31.

Because of preservation considerations, some of the more fragile documents will be displayed on a rotating basis. Although the objects will change from time to time, the Southwest Gallery and Pavilion will be permanently dedicated to the display of treasures from the Library's collections.

Left, in the late 1880s, German immigrant Emile Berliner created a new medium for sound recording and playback, the flat "Gramophone" disc. Thomas Edison's 1877 "wonderful invention," the phonograph, proved impractical in its original form because it was covered with tinfoil; right, published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was an immediate success, and its author, L. Frank Baum, was forced by demand to write more books about Dorothy and her friends. The tale debuted on the silver screen during the silent era, long before the famous MGM musical in 1939.

Left, the "original Rough draught" of the Declaration of Independence, one of the great milestones in American history, shows the evolution of the text from the initial "fair copy" draft by Thomas Jefferson to the final text, adopted by Congress on the morning of July 4, 1776; center, Night Street, featuring the poetry of Barbara Luck and the graphics of Lois Johnson, is a 1993 book whose content truly informs the physical structure; right, the Library's collection of 4,800 comic book titles, received through copyright deposit and probably the largest in America, contains nearly 100,000 issues, some dating back almost 60 years. Action Comics, Archie, Detective Comics, Tarzan and Walt Disney Comics (the first issue of which is pictured above) are among the titles the Library has in nearly complete runs.

Left, prepared as reference tools for insurance underwriters, fire insurance maps provide block-by-block inventories of buildings in the central sections of more than 12,000 American cities and towns from the 1870s until the 1950s. A typical example is the 1886 map of Tombstone, Ariz., which shows the O.K. Corral and surrounding streets, the location of the notorious gunfight between the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday and the Clanton gang on Oct. 26, 1881; right, the trouble with the countryside in the early days of the automobile was a lack of eateries. To meet this need, writers such as May Southworth and Linda Hull Larned of One Hundred "Picnic" Suggestions wrote recipe books specifically for the motorist. They included tips on how to heat one's meal by placing it over the internal combustion engine and how to keep ants away from the picnic site.

Online Exhibition: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/