EIS LIBRIS
EIS LIBRIS
Talks illustrated from the collection, 45 to 60 minutes with questions. Erik speaks in the Philadelphia region and travels for institutional invitations.
Historical societies, library friends' groups, general audiences
Franklin and Rush were both called Doctor Benjamin, one by honorary degree and the other by an Edinburgh MD, and their thirty-year friendship shaped the institutions of a city. Mentorship, medicine and the making of Philadelphia, told through letters, imprints and objects from the collection.
Medical schools, history of medicine societies, public health audiences
Five thousand dead, a government in flight, and a profession at war with itself. What Rush got wrong, what his rivals got right, and what the surviving pamphlets, minutes and letters actually say.
Printing and book-arts groups, bibliographical societies
What the New Printing-Office printed when it was not printing Poor Richard: laws, bonds, hospital notes, naturalization papers, sermons. How a print shop made a fortune and printed a city's institutions into existence.
Revolutionary-era societies, museums, general audiences
The Stamp Act, Franklin before Parliament, and the night in May 1766 when Boston hung lanterns in an elm, one of which is now in the collection. One object and everything it touches.
Collectors' clubs, rare book and manuscript groups, museum studies
Provenance, authenticity, and the discipline of collecting to explain rather than to accumulate. A collector's account of building a research collection, mistakes included.
Write with the date, venue, audience and format you have in mind. Talks can be tailored to an anniversary, an exhibition or a course. Exhibition loans are considered case by case under standard facilities-report and insurance terms.
For programs and press: Erik Soiferman, DO, MBA, FACOI, FACP, FCPP, is a Philadelphia-area physician and the builder of EIS LIBRIS, a research collection of eighteenth-century Philadelphia books, manuscripts, prints and objects centred on Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush. He writes and lectures on the medical and printing history of the city.
New objects, new rooms and announcements of lectures, sent only occasionally.
EIS LIBRIS will never share your address.