EIS LIBRIS
EIS LIBRIS
A research collection of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, arranged as ten moments.
EIS LIBRIS is a private research collection of eighteenth-century Philadelphia: the books, manuscripts, prints and instruments of the city Benjamin Franklin entered as a runaway apprentice in 1723 and in which Benjamin Rush died ninety years later. It is catalogued in full and open to researchers by appointment. This site presents the objects that carry the story, not the whole collection, and researchers who wish to see more are welcome to write to EIS LIBRIS.
The collection is organised not by author, format or subject heading but by moment. Ten of them, each a particular event or a particular span of years, and each assembled so that the objects in it once shared a world. A printing-house between 1722 and 1766. A club and the institutions it built. The Pennsylvania Hospital, from the first subscription to the first wards. A parlour in the years the nature of lightning was worked out. The years 1763 to 1769, from the frontier's march on the city to the Stamp Act. The break of a family and an empire. The making of a physician from Leiden through Edinburgh to Philadelphia. A reformer's career and the libel trial that followed it. The epidemic of 1793. And the long manufacture of a reputation after the men were dead.
The advantage of arranging a collection this way is that it makes the connections do the work. A promissory note is not simply a piece of hospital ephemera; it is a sheet Franklin printed, signed by the physicians who would train Rush's generation. A book of Boerhaave's aphorisms is not simply an old medical text; it is the copy John Redman bought at Edinburgh in 1746 and carried back to the Philadelphia shop where Rush served his apprenticeship. Placed by moment rather than by category, objects stop being examples and start being evidence.
Many pieces belong to more than one moment. Those are treated as bridges: they sit in one room and point to the other, so that a visitor can follow a person, an argument or a quarrel across the collection and return to where they started.
Three tests apply to every acquisition. It must carry a provenance argument that can be displayed beside the object. It must be Philadelphia or colonial American in origin, or belong to the European conversation that bears on the collection's focus. And it must fall closely enough within the years between Franklin's beginnings as a printer and Rush's death, roughly 1721 to 1813, that it can be placed on a shelf beside something with which it once shared a room.
Rarity alone is not a reason to buy. The question is whether an object closes a documented gap: a name that appears in one letter and is missing from the shelf, a press represented by its books but not by its job printing, a physician who disagreed with Rush and whose pamphlet is not yet beside his. The aim is to tell the whole story rather than only its highlights, and that means the ordinary paper of a trade matters as much as its masterpieces.
Museum-grade authenticity is the floor. Objects are examined and, where the class of object warrants it, independently verified. Condition reports and examination dates are part of the public catalogue record. Archival housing, conservation-grade display materials and reversible mounting are used throughout the room.
Erik Soiferman, DO, MBA, FACOI, FACP, FCPP, is a practising physician who has spent the better part of two decades building EIS LIBRIS. He reads the eighteenth century from inside medicine: what Rush's bleeding felt like to order, what a syllabus of lectures tells you about a school, why a hospital's promissory notes are the most honest documents it ever produced, and the sheer labour of hand-laying type for a thousand-page book.
He is an internist, board certified in Internal Medicine and in Hospice and Palliative Care Medicine. He has owned several medical practices and now works in a mixed clinical and administrative role. He is a graduate of Lower Merion High School, Muhlenberg College, the Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, and the Temple University Fox School of Business. He lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and is incredibly proud of his three sons, one daughter and one daughter-in-law. He lives by the motto that being a doctor is what he does, not who he is, and lets his family and his passions define him.
The collector is indebted to the many people who have helped him along the way, through their teaching, their inventory, their time and their patience. The collection is his. The journey has included a great many others.
To connect with Erik, write to erik@eislibris.com.