The Library of Congress: Uncle Sam’s Keeper of Kitsch

If you fancy a grinning Richard Nixon clown doll or a bas-relief of the Last Supper in bilious brown plastic, the Library of Congress is the place for you.

Famous for its priceless collection of books and manuscripts, the Library of Congress also is the secret repository for perhaps the world’s biggest collection of the ephemera of American pop culture.

From birdbaths to Barbie dolls, the library has it all.

“We don’t critique it, we just collect it,” says Frank J. Evina of the library’s U.S. Copyright Office, the government’s keeper of kitsch.

Here in this Washington suburb, miles from the library’s hushed, oak-paneled main reading room on Capitol Hill, the Copyright Office has schlepped enough schlock over the years to fill a cavernous warehouse nearly the size of a domed football stadium.

Stuffed in cardboard boxes and stacked high on metal shelves are millions of wall plaques, plaster busts, T-shirts, games, puzzles, dolls, gaudy fabrics, cereal boxes, posters, lamps, garden fountains, door knockers, wall thermometers, whiskey decanters and other memorabilia of America’s throwaway society.

“This is the creative genius of America,” said Evina with a wave of his arm. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

Until the copyright law was changed in 1978, applicants for copyright protection for their music, writings or artistic designs were required to submit two samples of their work to the Copyright Office.

That created a worsening headache for copyright officials, who had to store all that stuff somewhere, until Congress decided that photographs or written descriptions would suffice.

Although the Copyright Office has copyrighted more than 45 million items since the late19th Century, the bulk of the objects kept at the Landover warehouse cover pop culture of the late 1950s through the 1970s.

For Watergate wallowers, there is the Watergate chess set. Pieces sculpted in white represent the good guys, Sam Ervin and his Senate investigators. Opposing pieces cast in a dark hues include President Nixon in a defiant pose, flanked by his gang of Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Mitchell and Dean.

Music lovers can sample more than 2 million audio tape cassettes of forgettable songs that were copyrighted--but never published--by neighborhood garage rock bands. Sample titles: “Punch a Wall,” “Where Does All This Love Come From?” and “Take Me Back to Adolescence.”

Among the plaster likenesses of Buddha, Harpo Marx, John F. Kennedy, Don Quixote, Albert Schweitzer, Laurel and Hardy and a snarling German shepherd was a stack of X-rated videos, including “Hot Nights at the Blue Note Cafe,” and a box of pornographic paperback novels with titles like “Naughty, Naughty Wife.”

The collection is closed to the public, but Evina says the Library of Congress probably ought to mount an exhibition of this low-life Americana some day.

“Someday someone will thank us for keeping all these things,” said the government’s guru of gewgaws.