Gently, gently, the librarian opens the first of the five books displayed on the large wooden table, and age seems to rise up from the pages like a wavy distortion above heated pavement.

It’s an English volume, “A New System of Modern Geography,” in its first American printing in 1794, bound in brown leather with marbled paper, and gold gilt along the top edge. On an inside right page is the neatly formal signature of its most famous owner — the first president of the United States.

The book has navigational charts and a Copernican model of a sun-centered solar system. George Washington read this book, you think, and dusty old history feels immediately present and tactile and shivery. That’s the effect James Rees, president and chief executive of George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate, Museum and Gardens, was going for when he decided to replicate the first president’s 1,200-volume personal library, book by book.

“A rare book library will send chills up your spine,” Rees says. “You wouldn’t associate Washington with a library as much as you would guns,” but he says Washington has been underestimated all these years.

Washington’s personal library is part of the larger $100 million Fred W. Smith National Library, opening September 2013. Named for the benefactor who chairs the Las Vegas-based Reynolds Foundation, which provided a majority of the building’s funding, the 45,000-square-foot library will consist of three floors, built into a hillside on a 55-acre portion of Mount Vernon that was once part of Washington’s original farm. It will house historical manuscripts, special collection photos and memorabilia, and 150 years of Mount Vernon archives.

Washington’s original books, which were catalogued before his death, were split among family members after he died. By 1848, most were sold to Henry Stevens, a prominent Massachusetts bookseller. After Stevens announced plans to sell his collection to the British Museum, a Boston and Cambridge-based group purchased the collection and donated it to the Boston Athenaeum, where it remains today.

Mount Vernon has fewer than 50 of the original books and 450 duplicate additions — same book, same printing. The rest will hopefully come from the Boston Athenaeum, through purchases or donations, or they will be replicated with pages scanned from the Athenaeum’s collection and put into an 18th-century-style binding with endpaper and leather and gold tooling.

Libraries have been replicated before “but it’s not been done for Washington because no one would have thought his library was interesting enough to do it,” Rees says. The first president was self-conscious about his lack of formal education. He was self-taught. Though the books will eventually be available digitally, Rees hopes scholars and researchers “will eventually be able to stand in this room and look at the library around him. To learn about his personality and likes and dislikes through what he was reading.” He hopes it will lead to a fuller measure of the man and a deeper feel for history.