A 1903 children’s book, printed in Minneapolis for Norwegian church homes, still carries this line:
Entered according to Act of Congress… in the Office of the Librarian of Congress at Washington, D.C.
That sentence is the whole American trick in miniature. After 1870, if you wanted a U.S. copyright, you sent copies to the Library of Congress. LC did not buy every book in the country. Deposit law poured them in—hymnals, primers, farm almanacs, a pig that waddles into the parsonage on Sunday while everyone else is in church.
The publisher was the Free Church Book Concern, the print shop of the Lutheran Free Church, Norwegian-American, Minneapolis. The book teaches a child to pray—and then tells him that a pig remains a pig even if he tours every parsonage in the world.
By 1901 LC was printing catalog cards and selling them to other libraries. One record in Washington could stand in for the same title from Brooklyn to North Dakota. This Norwegian reader with my great uncle’s name scrawled at the top of the first leaf and the national library were in the same paperwork.
The copyright lapsed long ago. The pig, the prayer, and the Washington stamp did not.
