Library Company of Philadelphia

Members of the Library Company soon opened their own book presses to make donations: A Collection of Several Pieces, by John Locke; Logic: or, the Art of Thinking, by the Port Royalists Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, which Franklin in his autobiography said he had read at the age of 16; Plutarch's Moralia translated by Philemon Holland; Lewis Roberts' Merchants Mappe of Commerce, and others.Overtures to the proprietor of Pennsylvania, John Penn at Pennsbury at first elicited no more than a polite response, but an unsolicited gift of 34 pounds sterling arrived in the summer of 1738 from Walter Sydserfe, a Scottish-born physician and planter of Antigua.Excluding gifts, a third of the holdings of 375 titles were historical works, geographies and accounts of voyages and travels, a category the Library Company has collected energetically throughout its history.A fifth of the titles were literature, mostly in the form of poetry and plays, for the prose novel was still in its infancy: as late as 1783, in the first orders from London after the war years, the directors thought "we should not think it expedient to add to our present stock, anything in the novel way."When John Penn, making up for his slow start, sent an air-pump to the learned society in 1739, the directors, to house it commissioned a glazed cabinet, the earliest extant example of American-made Palladian architectural furniture.Collinson, who had faithfully executed the Company's requests for books over the years, sent windfalls in 1755 and in 1758 in the form of boxes of his own copies of a score of 17th-century accounts of the newly established British colonies in America, among them such classics as Strachey's Lawes, Mourt's Relation and John Smith's General Historie of Virginia."The Books (inclosed within Wire Lattices) are kept in one large Room," Franklin was informed in London, "and in another handsome Apartment the [scientific] Apparatus is deposited and the Directors meet."On September 5, 1774, the First Continental Congress met on the first floor of Carpenters' Hall, and the Library Company extended members' privileges to all the delegates.Virtually every significant work on political theory, history, law, and statecraft (and much else besides) could be found on the Library Company's shelves, as well as numerous tracts and polemical writings by American as well as European authors.A competition for the design of a building was won by an amateur of architecture, Dr. William Thornton, with a plan for a Palladian red-brick structure with white pilasters and a pediment interrupting a balustraded roof.For the new library Samuel Jennings, an expatriate Philadelphian living in London, painted a large picture, "Liberty Displaying the Arts and Sciences."In the second half of the 20th century, under the direction of Edwin Wolf II, an energetic program of renewal brought the Library Company once more into a busy and vital center of national importance for research and education.