During the summer of 1809, several months after Thomas Jefferson had left the presidency and retired permanently to Monticello, John W. Campbell, a bookseller and printer from Petersburg, Virginia, wrote to him proposing to publish ‘a complete edition of your different writings, as far as they may be designed for the public; including the “Notes on Virginia”’. Jefferson was not especially encouraging in his reply to Campbell. He wrote that he intended to revise and enlarge his Notes on Virginia before it could be republished. With regard to the large body of official papers he had generated as a congressman, governor, diplomat, secretary of state, vice president and president, he dismissed interest in these, noting, ‘Many of these would be like old newspapers, materials for future historians, but no longer interesting to the readers of the day.’ He concluded: