The title of Kevin Hayes’s new study of Thomas Jefferson, “The Road to Monticello” (Oxford University Press, 752 pages, $34.95), holds out several possibilities. Is it a book about Jefferson’s famous house, which he spent much of his life building and rebuilding, and which still stands as a monument to his multifaceted genius? Or could it be a biography covering the first decades of Jefferson’s life, leading up to the ground-breaking on his mountaintop home?

In fact, the name Monticello in the title is a bit of red herring. It is the rare reader who will guess that Mr. Hayes’s title, as he explains in an afterword, is actually an homage to “The Road to Xanadu,” John Livingston Lowes’s 1927 study of the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By meticulously analyzing every book Coleridge read, Lowes was able to trace the mysterious images of “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” back to their original sources. Lowes’s book broke new ground in literary criticism, though it also disturbed readers such as T.S. Eliot, who insisted that a poem could not be reduced to a list of ingredients, like a cake.

Mr. Hayes’s title seems to promise that he will do the same thing for Thomas Jefferson that Lowes did for Coleridge. But while he has performed feats of research in tracking down the many, many books Jefferson read, his results are not revelatory in the same way that Lowes’s were. The reason is simply that Jefferson was not a poet, or even an imaginative writer. He did not subject the texts he read to the mysterious process of recombination that leads to new creation. As a man of action, who read to obtain knowledge rather than inspiration, he assimilated his sources in a much more conventional way, and they are correspondingly easier to trace. It is no secret, for instance, that Locke influenced the Declaration of Independence, or that “Notes on the State of Virginia” was written partly as a rebuttal of the biological theories of Buffon.

If “The Road to Monticello” does not revolutionize our understanding of the great revolutionary, however, it is illuminating in other, less spectacular ways. By writing a “literary life” of Jefferson, Mr. Hayes, a professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, is able to approach his extremely well-known subject from unexpected angles. There is almost nothing here about Jefferson the president, whose disastrous embargo split the country in the 1800s; or Jefferson the party leader, who spent the 1790s intriguing against John Adams’s Federalists; or Jefferson the slave owner, whose affair with Sally Hemings has received more attention in recent years than any of his accomplishments.

The Jefferson we get to know in these pages, rather, is the voracious reader and book collector, the happy victim of what he called “bibliomanie.” Lincoln may surpass Jefferson as a writer, and Theodore Roosevelt was more of a professional man of letters, but no American president can rival Jefferson’s sheer intellectual curiosity. This is all the more striking because he was clearly not “an intellectual” in the current sense of that word — that is, his livelihood and social standing did not derive from his skill at manipulating ideas.

Jefferson remained a Virginia gentleman even when he became a radical democrat, and as Mr. Hayes shows, he was deeply reluctant to compromise his dignity by engaging in the sordid business of publication. His most famous writing was done in an official capacity, quasi-anonymously — as when he drafted the Declaration of Independence for the Continental Congress, or the Statute for Religious Freedom for the Virginia Legislature. Even with “Notes on the State of Virginia,” his most literary work, Jefferson preferred to give his friends handwritten copies. Only after several years, as the manuscript grew along with the demand for it, did Jefferson consent to have the work privately printed, in Paris, for limited distribution.

Jefferson’s ideal was not the professional writer but the gentleman scholar — a man like Montaigne, who could withdraw from the press of courts and cities to a life of leisure and learning. Mr. Hayes is perhaps too ready to credit Jefferson’s disavowals of ambition — a genuinely private man would not have become governor of Virginia, secretary of state, vice president, and president — but it is true that he always left Monticello with a pang, and returned to it with real pleasure. Back home in 1809, two months after the end of his presidency, Jefferson wrote a friend that he was “enjoying a species of happiness I never before knew, that of doing whatever hits the humor of the moment without responsibility or injury to any one.”

More often than not, what hit Jefferson’s humor was reading. The bulk of Mr. Hayes’ book testifies to the sheer number and variety of titles that Jefferson devoured. As a law student, he read “Coke upon Littleton,” the classic treatise on English law; as a novice farmer, he studied Jethro Tull’s standard guide, “Horse-Hoeing Husbandry”; in his leisure hours, he read the melancholy poetry of Ossian, which enjoyed a vogue in the 1760s. As a legislator in Virginia, and later at the Continental Congress, Jefferson made use of treatises on natural law — Grotius’s “De Jure Belli ac Pacis,” Pufendorf’s “Law of Nature and Nations” — whose concepts are reflected in the Declaration of Independence. While drafting the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom, which he considered one of his proudest accomplishments, Jefferson read Milton’s “Reason of Church-Government” and Shaftesbury’s “Letter Concerning Enthusiasm.”

And this doesn’t even scratch the surface: Jefferson read constantly, copiously, in many languages. (He even designed a rotating bookstand that allowed him to consult five books at a time.) Naturally, as an Enlightenment philosophe in good standing, he knew French long before he was posted to France as America’s ambassador. He also read Italian and Spanish, which he taught his daughters using “Don Quixote” as a textbook.

Like most Virginia planters, Jefferson studied Latin and Greek as a boy; unlike most, he actually learned them, and used them for the rest of his life. Studying the marginalia in Jefferson’s law books, Mr. Hayes discovered apposite quotations from Herodotus and Euripides, in the original. Much more unusually, however, Jefferson was also a student of Anglo-Saxon. At a time when the language of “Beowulf” had not yet entered the college curriculum, Mr. Hayes writes, Jefferson’s “sizable collection of Anglo-Saxon books included nearly all of the important studies of the language.” He studied the Bible in polyglot editions that included Hebrew and Aramaic; he read the first translations of Indian and Persian literature, just then appearing in English. To amuse himself in retirement, Jefferson even bought Robert Morison’s “Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language, With a Free and Verbal Translation in English.”

All these languages gave Jefferson a wide field for reading, and, what he loved almost as much, for collecting. One of the chief pleasures of “The Road to Monticello” is Mr. Hayes’s evocation of a world, almost unimaginable in the age of Amazon, when buying good books was an art in itself. As a novice lawyer in Williamsburg, Virginia’s capital, in the 1760s, Jefferson could only obtain books through the local newspaper, the Virginia Gazette, whose owner imported them from Europe. Even in this Colonial backwater, however, he was able to obtain the two-volume folio of Guiccardini’s history of Italy, a masterpiece of Renaissance historiography. It is a vivid demonstration of the international reach of the Republic of Letters. For an educated man with money and the right contacts, the Atlantic Ocean was no barrier to book-buying.

Still, for Jefferson to get the books he wanted, in the right format and at the right price, required work. Whenever he visited a new city, Mr. Hayes shows, Jefferson made a beeline for the bookshops. He knew all the booksellers in Philadelphia and New York, and made contacts with dealers in England, Germany, and France. During his time in Paris, Jefferson recalled, “I devoted every afternoon I was disengaged, for a summer or two, in examining all the principal bookstores, turning over every book with my own hand, and putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science.”

A life of such assiduous collecting meant that, in his 70s, Jefferson had assembled the best private library in North America. What’s more, he had meticulously cataloged it, according to a system of his own design inspired by the psychological theories of Francis Bacon. “On every book is a label,” Jefferson explained, “indicating the chapter of the catalogue to which it belongs, and the order it holds among those of the same format.” In 1815, he arranged to sell the whole collection to the nation as the core of a new Library of Congress, to replace the books lost when the British burned Washington. “It is the choicest collection of books in the United States,” Jefferson boasted, “and I hope it will not be without some general effect on the literature of our country.” His library was perhaps the least momentous of Jefferson’s gifts to his country, but it was the one he gave most lovingly. He would certainly have appreciated the answering affection and erudition that Mr. Hayes has poured into “The Road to Monticello.”

akirsch@nysun.com