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Bookplate Index by Library or Collector |
Library Company of Philadelphia Although Benjamin Franklin is not the father of his country, he is, in fact, the father of many American institutions, one of the most important being the subscription library. The Library Company of Philadelphia served a very real need of the time. In 1727 Franklin had founded the Junto Club, the first club in America patterned after those English institutions, often centered in the coffeehouse, where men met for conversation on issues of the day. Franklin's New World transplantation of this institution was successful, for many organizations flourished after the Junto began in 1727. The Junto's members were middle-class working and business men of Whiggish inclination. The organization's rules, drawn up by Franklin, included the requirement that each member must "in his turn . . . produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy" for discussion and "once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing on any subject he pleased," as he later noted in the Autobiography. Naturally, reference sources would be required for such active participation, and since these books were too expensive and difficult for individuals to acquire easily, the club pooled its resources. Thus on 1 July 1731, fifty members pledged ten shillings per year and contributed forty shillings each to establish the "Mother" subscription library in America. The first order for books was placed on 31 March 1732, and 5 December is celebrated annually as the date of the arrival of those first books from London. The Library Company's seal, used on its bookplate, shows "'Two Books open, Each encompass'd with Glory, or Beams of Light, between which Water streaming from above into an Urn below, thence issues at many Vents into lesser Urns, and Motto, circumscribing the whole, Communiter Bona profundere Deum est.' This translates freely: ‘To pour forth benefits for the common good is divine'" as Edwin Wolf 2nd, its librarian, explains in the library's most recent history. The bookplate, reproducing that seal originally engraved by the silversmith Philip Syng, is still applied to modern books. A printed label, also shown here, goes into rare books acquired by the library. A third plate bearing the design of the Loganian Library is placed in special collections given to the library. The Library Company of Philadelphia began as the reading library for a group of prominent colonists, served the Junto as a home for scientific inquiry and the repository of a variety of specimens as different as the electrical apparatus with which they conducted experiments and an Egyptian mummy's arm, functioned as the governmental library while the Continental Congress and later the national government were resident in Philadelphia, and now serves as one of the most important scholarly, rare books libraries in the U.S. Now 246 years old, it deserves respect not only for its age, but also for the manner in which it has evolved to serve the changing needs of its members and scholars and for its unique position as an American institution. Anna Lou Ashby
[Originally published in Journal of Library History, vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1977): |
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