EIS LIBRIS
EIS LIBRIS
Welcome to
A virtual museum of the books, documents and artifacts that tell the story of Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush: their lives, their work, and the city in which they lived.
EIS LIBRIS is a private library and collection. It holds objects both common and unique: some that carry stories everyone knows, others that throw new light on an artifact or a subject nobody has looked at closely. It is a living thing. It expands and contracts as it is curated, and a piece is added only when it adds real weight to some facet of the story the collection tells.
The collection is arranged not by author or format but by moment. Ten rooms, each one an event or a subject: a printing-house, a club and the institutions it built, the first hospital in the colonies, a parlour where four men worked out the nature of lightning, the year the frontier came to the city, the break of a family and an empire, the making of a physician, a reformer's career and the trial that followed it, an epidemic, and the long manufacture of a reputation afterwards.
Objects that belong to more than one moment are bridges. They carry a person or an argument from one room into another.
We hope you enjoy your visit. The collection is open to researchers and to anyone interested in Franklin and Rush.
Philadelphia in type, 1718 to 1766
50 objects
The Junto, the Library Company, the Hospital, 1727 to 1755
15 objects
Founded 1751
17 objects
Philadelphia and the lightning, 1747 to 1752
11 objects
Paxton, the election, the Stamp Act, and the land, 1763 to 1769
11 objects
Franklin, his son, and the Revolution, 1774 to 1783
7 objects
The making of a physician, 1760 to 1813
25 objects
Physician, teacher, reformer, and the trial that followed, 1745 to 1813
42 objects
Philadelphia, 1793
41 objects
Editions, lives and the making of a reputation, 1790 to 1860
23 objectsA finding aid to the collection
Eighteenth-century Philadelphia was a small town. The men who founded its library also founded its hospital, its college, its fire company and its learned society, and they witnessed one another's bonds and married one another's daughters.
Choose an institution and see who belonged to it. Choose a name and read the life. Then follow it to every primary source in the collection that carries that name.
Meet the cast of 91New objects, new rooms and announcements of lectures, sent only occasionally.
EIS LIBRIS will never share your address.