There’s a lot of history to celebrate on America’s 250th birthday Library Company of PhiladelphiaIt is the oldest public rare book collection in the United States, founded in 1731 by Benjamin Franklin.
The nation’s forty-five-year-old, historic nonprofit once extended borrowing privileges to delegates to the First and Second Continental Congresses and the Constitutional Convention. Before becoming the official Library of Congress, it served as the research arm of the fledgling US government.
Now, as always, it displays Franklin’s electrostatic machine and William Penn’s desk. But there’s also something more racist on the menu as the library celebrates a recent gift of 1,500 rare volumes highlighting centuries of perspectives on sex and reproductive anatomy.
The sexuality collection is the latest donation from Charles E. Rosenberg, 89, professor emeritus of the history of science at Harvard University, who has already given the library about 15,000 books on the social aspects of medicine, topics covered in six books he wrote. He described his latest gifts largely as “how to conduct your sex-life” books.
“There are certainly some graphic materials, but they are not intended to be pornographic,” said Rachel D’Agostino, the library’s curator of printed books.
This collection includes dozens of variations on a cornerstone primer on sexuality, “Aristotle’s masterpiece” It was not actually by Aristotle, and it was hardly a masterpiece, but the widely pirated, often dubiously informed manual was in continuous print for more than two centuries since its first anonymous publication in London in 1684.
Mary Fissell, a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University who is writing a book about the book, said the unknown author presented himself as a Greek philosopher who had gained a reputation (largely undeserved and not at all serious) as the Dr. Ruth of antiquity in 17th-century England. But the popularity of the underground best seller waned when anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock suppressed sex books in this country in the 1870s. “He killed it,” she said.
As it approaches its 300th birthday, the library company is marking its own milestone – a pending merger with Temple University to handle its shaky finances and expand its academic and public footprint. The deal, approved by shareholders of both prospective partners last December, is awaiting approval by the Pennsylvania Attorney General and the state judicial unit that oversees charities, known as Orphans Court.
Like many nonprofits, the library, with an annual budget of about $3 million, has struggled financially in recent years and its staff, which numbered 28 two years ago, has dwindled to 16.
Joining forces will expand scholarship for the university’s approximately 35,000 students and faculty while securing the library’s public future, Temple President John Fry said in an interview. “This is the best chance we have to keep it going for the next 300 years.”
Jessica Chopin Roney, the future director of the library company and associate professor of history at Temple, said that Franklin’s commitment to populism would have made him “really excited about Temple.”
He said, as a Quaker colony with no established church or strong central government, Pennsylvania was particularly open to volunteer projects such as libraries.
What Franklin might have thought of sex books is not known, although he did reprint and publish in 1734 the book “Every Man His Own Doctor: Or the Poor Planter’s Physician” by a Virginia doctor named John Tennent, which offered a method of home abortion.
The latest Rosenberg gift includes a set of another rare book, “Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution,” first published in London in the early 1700s, which warns against masturbation.
The donation also included several books on topics that might be classified as LGBTQ life today – one, on “Greek Ethics” bearing the plaintively written inscription: “For Bob, if only we had lived longer. Sincerely Phil.”
In total, the Library Company, once located in Independence Hall and since 1965 in a Center City building at 1314 Locust Street, holds an estimated 500,000 books and a similar number of historical papers, photographs and artifacts. Visitors do not wander through the stacks but request items from librarians.
“Franklin spent more time and care on the Library Company than on any other civic project,” University of Delaware historian J.A. Leo LeMay wrote in his incomplete biography after his death in 2008. Franklin founded it as an extension of his Junto Mutual Reform Discussion Club of 1727 and served as its director, librarian, and book agent.
He wrote in his autobiography that the idea was that “by combining our books into one common library, we should keep them together, but each of us should have the advantage of using the books of all the other members, which would be almost as beneficial as if each had entire ownership.”
With few booksellers outside Boston, Franklin, then 25, charged customers a nominal fee of shillings to join and promised additional sums to purchase books from England. They usually met in taverns, and were fined for missing a scheduled meeting over “a pint of wine”. As inscriptions show, Franklin donated some of his own volumes, including an English translation of “Logic or the Art of Thinking”, a French text of 1717, and according to the Lemay book the group voted to purchase such texts as “Gulliver’s Travels” and the “Quran”.
In 1740, the Library housed about 375 of its titles in the State House of Pennsylvania (now Independence Hall), and in 1773 it moved to Carpenters’ Hall, a newly constructed craft guild house nearby.
The following year, the First Continental Congress convened to respond to the “intolerable acts” of King George III, becoming its lower neighbor. The Library welcomed the delegates with a resolution, now preserved on the shelves of a limited quantity of the original handwritten minutes:
“On motion, Ordered: That the Librarian furnish to the gentlemen meeting in Congress in this city the use of such books as they shall have occasion for during their sitting, taking a receipt for them.”
That hospitality was extended to gatherings before and after the Revolution. “America is a baby compared to us,” said D’Agostino, who teaches at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia.
A new exhibit at the library examines the atmosphere of radicalism that propelled the colonists toward independence. During a tour, Librarian Emeritus James N. The highlight, pointed out by Green, is a rare surviving document from 1766, which shows the royal imprint of the Revised Stamp Act imposed on colonists after Britain’s costly war with France for control of North America. Almost none are in existence because patriots promptly burned the stamped papers.
Also on display is Thomas Paine’s copy of “The American Crisis,” which Greene said was likely read to troops under General Washington before crossing the Delaware River for a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton at Christmas 1776.
Rosenberg’s gifts to the Library Company date back to the 1960s and stem from his time at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught the history of science from 1963 to 2001. His first gifts were received by Edwin Wolf II, the company’s notable librarian. (At Penn, in 1980, Rosenberg married Drew Gilpin Faust, a fellow historian, who served as Harvard’s president from 2007 to 2018.)
“I’ve always had that collector’s thing,” Rosenberg said, explaining his interest in “how people thought about medicine – ethnographic, not just who discovered what.”
In his unfinished autobiography, written from 1771 to 1790, when he died at the age of 84, Benjamin Franklin expressed particular pride in his library company, which he called “the mother of all the American subscription libraries now so numerous.”
He further said, “These libraries have improved the general conversation of Americans, made the common merchants and farmers as intelligent as most gentlemen of other countries, and have probably contributed in some measure to the stand generally made throughout the colonies to protect their privileges.”
