...opening today at the Boston Public Library is the first public exhibition of the second president's vast personal library, a priceless collection of 3,802 works whose breadth helps show why this Braintree farmer is gaining recognition as one of the true American giants.

Not only will the public be able to see the entire collection for the first time, but dozens of Adams's books have been laid open in glass cases to display the notes, musings, and commentaries he wrote in the margins of nearly everything he read. The free exhibit will continue until April, but the library already has embarked on a years-long project to digitize the books for public study on the Internet.

``God bless the man," said Beth Prindle, curator of the John Adams collection. ``It seems that a thought never trickled through his mind that he didn't write down."

Scholarly and scathing, catty and conversational, Adams's writings show strong opinions on many of the great events, leaders, and debates of his day.

``Not one of the Projects of the Sage of La Mancha was more absurd, ridiculous or delirious than this of a Revolution in France," Adams wrote in 1812 in the margins of Mary Wollstonecraft's ``Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution." In that book, whose author Adams alternately called ``a Lady of a masculine masterly Understanding" and ``this foolish Woman," the former president penned 10,000 words of analysis.

There's a forensic map, drawn by Paul Revere, that Adams used at trial in his defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre. And there's his personal atlas, published in Paris in 1778, that shows his native Massachusetts in careful, stunning detail...