“While from all sides, most learned sir, your sacred studies in promoting literature are interrupted by the sons of the muses and the priests of the mysteries, there can hardly be one or two perhaps from these American shores who claim your attention. Therefore, allow me, since what is strange and distant wins esteem not on account of its worth but because it is unusual, to address you from the wilds of Pennsylvania.” As a token of respect, Logan selected a dozen superior animal skins from his warehouse and sent them along with the letter. In reply, Fabricius reaffirmed his belief that the Greek edition represented the first printing of the work; to prove it, he sent the curious American his own copy of the book.
Despite the professor’s touching generosity, Logan remained unconvinced and set about to prove his contention. On January 3, 1726, he wrote Timothy Forbes, his agent in Dublin, with an urgent request. Logan explained that in 1698 he had sold his first library “to a bookseller who lived in Castle Street,” and among the “considerable quantity” of books he left behind was an early edition of the Ptolemy, printed in Latin. He provided a description of the book and suggested that maybe the volume was still around: “It is not very improbable but that same book may be found among ye Rubbish.” Ever the thrifty Quaker, Logan estimated a value of five shillings but quickly professed his willingness “to give considerably more” if necessary.
Because Logan’s letter-books record only outgoing correspondence, there is no way of knowing where Forbes found the book, but he did find it, and the sturdy folio bound in brown calfskin was reunited with its former owner after a separation of twenty-eight years. The text, moreover, was printed in Latin, and the year of publication was 1515. Logan’s letter of gratitude, dated February 6, 1727, is filled with ebullience; to cover the cost of ten shillings he sent along a half Guinea, with instructions that Forbes keep the change and use it “to melt in a bottle with ye person thou bought it of.” Like so many of Logan’s books, the margins of Almagest are replete with pertinent commentary, but in this case the title page is where the bibliophile’s passion is felt most powerfully, undiminished by the passage of two and a half centuries. Liber rarissimus, he has written in a bold hand below his signature, “the rarest book.”
When Benjamin Franklin and his friends were working out details for their new subscription library in 1731, the person they approached for advice was James Logan. The following year, when the Library Company of Philadelphia approved its first bylaws, Logan was the only nonmember allowed to borrow books. A few years earlier, Logan had expressed serious reservations about Franklin’s discussion club, the Junto—he had called its members “base and lying lackeys” for their support of paper currency—but he became friends with Franklin and considered him an “ingenious” young man. Franklin, in turn, had the highest regard for Logan.
Four years after forming the Library Company, in 1735, Franklin published Logan’s metrical translation of Cato’s Moral Distichs, the first translation from the classics to be produced in North America. In 1744 Franklin brought out an elegant edition of Logan’s translation of Cicero’s Cato Major, though the old squire required the printer to issue it anonymously. In a preface, Franklin teased his readers by noting that the work “was done by a Gentleman amongst us (whose Name or Character I am strictly forbid to mention, tho’ it might give some Advantage to my Edition.)”
Five years later Logan endorsed Franklin’s proposal to establish an academy that ultimately became the University of Pennsylvania. In “Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania,” Franklin gave a detailed description of a library “which has been many Years collecting with the greatest Care, by a Gentleman distinguish’d for his universal Knowledge, no less than his Judgment in Books.” Franklin reported how a building “above 60 feet in front, is now erected in this City, at the private Expence of that Gentleman, for the Reception of this Library, where it is soon to be deposited, and remain for the publick Use, with a valuable yearly Income duly to enlarge it.” This announcement appeared in 1749, Logan’s fiftieth year in America, and it resolved a dilemma that had been weighing on him for some time: What was to become of his precious books after his death? After considering a number of proposals, he decided to create a repository “which I suppose may vie with any in America.” He also had a name for it: taking Oxford’s Sir Thomas Bodley and the Bodleian Library as a model, he directed that his collection be known as the Loganian Library.
On October 31, 1751, James Logan died “in a very easy manner.” The old man’s final words, according to a son-in-law in attendance, were mumbled instructions for another letter to a bookseller. Benjamin Franklin’s obituary in The Pennsylvania Gazette, unsigned but undoubtedly written by that periodical’s founder and part owner, concluded with words from one consummate bookman to another:
But the most noble Monument of his Wisdom, Publick Spirit, Benevolence, and affectionate Regard to the People of Pennsylvania, is his LIBRARY; which he had been collecting these 50 Years past, with the greatest Care and Judgment, intending it a Benefaction to the Publick for the Increase of Knowledge, and for the common Use and Benefit of all Lovers of Learning. It contains the best Editions of the best Books in various Languages, Arts and Sciences, and is without Doubt the largest, and by far the most valuable Collection of the kind in this Part of the World, and will convey the name of LOGAN thro’ the Ages, with Honour, to the latest Posterity.
Half a century later, an English author, John Davis, who chronicled his extensive travels through the United States between 1798 and 1802, recalled that his first order of business in Philadelphia was to pay homage to James Logan: “I here behold the portrait of a man whom I consider so great a benefactor to Literature, that he is scarcely less illustrious than its munificent patrons of Italy; his soul has certainly been admitted to the company of a Cosmo [sic] and Lorenzo of Medicis. The Greek and Roman authors forgotten on their native banks of the Ilyssus and Tiber, delight by the kindness of a Logan the votaries to learning on those of the Delaware.”
When Davis offered that tribute, Logan’s two thousand books had just emerged from several decades of indifferent stewardship, caused in part by resolution of a lengthy and complicated will. The Library Company became permanent trustee of the books in 1789, not long after passing another milestone in its distinguished history. During the hot summer of 1787, when the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia, the reading club located just two blocks from Independence Hall served as a “delegates’ library” for the fifty-five men charged with writing the Constitution of the United States. Paradoxically, Benjamin Franklin, the man who had formed the Library Company of Philadelphia fifty-six years earlier—the man who worked to preserve James Logan’s books as a unit—saw no merit in keeping his own exceptional collection intact.
While the Constitutional Convention deliberated in Philadelphia, a clergyman from New England, Dr. Manasseh Cutler, on July 13, 1787, visited the home of Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-one years old. “After it was dark, we went into the house, and the Doctor invited me into his library, which is likewise his study,” Cutler wrote in his diary. “It is a very large chamber, and high studded. The walls ere covered with bookshelves filled with books; besides there are four large alcoves, extending two-thirds of the length of the chamber, filled in the same manner. I presume this is the largest, and by far the best, private library in America.”
If not the best—Thomas Jefferson’s private library was outstanding— Franklin certainly did own one of the finest during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. An inventory made after his death in 1790 listed 4,276 volumes, almost as many as owned by the Library Company. In his will Franklin directed that the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, the American Philosophical Society (the successor to the “Junto” club), and the Library Company of Philadelphia receive a few selected items, but because of one unfortunate stipulation, most volumes faced an uncertain future: “The residue and remainder of all my books, manuscripts, and papers, I do give
to my grandson, William Temple Franklin.”
William Temple Franklin—the illegitimate son of William Franklin, who was the illegitimate son of Benjamin Franklin—had visited England with his grandfather before the Revolution and served as his secretary for eight years in Paris during the war, from 1777 to 1785. A few months after claiming his inheritance, Temple Franklin returned to England, taking with him the manuscript of Franklin’s Autobiography but disposing of virtually everything else. Eleven years later, in 1801, what remained of the Franklin library was offered for sale by Nicholas Gouin Dufief, a twenty-five-year-old French immigrant soon to become Philadelphia’s most successful bookseller. Precisely how Dufief came by the books has never been clearly established, but in 1803, he mailed a letter to the president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, informing him that about two thousand items were still available, “some containing marginal notes” in Franklin’s hand.
“I send you the catalogue of books remaining to me from the Library of Dr. Franklin,” he wrote to Jefferson on January 1, 1803. “When you have looked it over, I beg you to deliver it to the Librarian of Congress to whom I propose, in the belief that he would be authorized to make the purchase of the collection en bloc or in part.” What better way for Congress to spend money, he continued, “than to use it to rescue the books of one of the founders of the American Republic and of a great man! It is not a spirit of speculation that makes me use this language for outside of the fact that these books belong in a national library, being in large part on the politics, the legislation and the affairs of America, I would dispose of them at a price so reasonable, that one could never accuse me of such a thing.”
On February 4, 1803, Jefferson sent Dufief ’s proposal to the Congressional Library Committee, noting that prior dealings with the bookseller “give me assurance that his prices would be moderate. Without presuming on the answer of the committee to this proposal I have ventured to mark with a pencil a few particular books which I imagine are worthy of their acquisition if they are not already in the library.” A month later, the president wrote Dufief that because of “exhausted” funds, Congress deemed it “unnecessary” to consider such a purchase. Jefferson did select several books from the Franklin catalogue for his own library, however. Dufief promptly announced an auction, issued a new list, and sold everything. Because no catalogue survives, the full contents of Franklin’s library are unknown, though several attempts have been made to reconstruct it, most notably by Edwin Wolf 2nd during his long tenure as librarian at the Library Company of Philadelphia (1955–1984).
Despite the federal government’s apparent lack of interest in preserving the books and documents of its founders, a new sense of national identity did bring about a fundamental change in the kinds of material Americans collected. Though he spent two thirds of his life in America, James Logan was very much a British subject, and his taste in books was decidedly European. But a more provincial focus was already taking shape in Boston, as can be seen from the pioneering efforts of a collector whose driving interest was to document his own place and time.
Born to affluent parents in the Cape Cod town of Sandwich in 1687, Thomas Prince acquired a taste for reading while a child, living with his maternal grandfather, Thomas Hinckley, the last governor of Plymouth Colony. Hinckley not only had an excellent library but also favored the youngster with frequent gifts of books. When Prince entered Harvard at the age of sixteen, he began assembling what he called his “New England Library,” material that dealt with the history and culture of his native region. Later, as associate pastor of the Old South Church—an appointment he retained for forty years— Prince gathered religious material he designated the “South Church Library.” His bookplates for both collections state his hope that they would “remain therein forever.”
In a 1728 edition of the New England Weekly Journal, a notice announced the sale of a one hundred-acre parcel of “choice” farmland in Leicester, Massachusetts. “Inquire of the Rev. Mr. Prince,” the advertisement advised, and added slyly, almost as an afterthought, “who also intending to Dispose of his Library desires those who have borrowed Books from Him to return them quickly.” No records exist of Prince’s ever parting willingly with any of his books; that same year, in fact, he declared his intention “to lay hold on every Book, Pamphlet, or Paper, both in Print, and manuscript, which was written by Persons who lived here, or that had any Tendency to enlighten our History.” He had begun assembling material for a work he would title A Chronological History of New England in the Form of Annals, a mammoth study that appeared in two volumes between 1736 and 1756. Though it is a convoluted work that makes for ponderous reading, Prince’s compilation is nonetheless considered the first critical evaluation of American history.
Even more significant, perhaps, is the scholarly standard its author embraced: “I would not take the least iota upon trust, if possible. I examined the original authors I could meet with. Some may think me too critical. I think the writer of facts cannot be too critical. I cite vouchers for every passage.” Prince was able to provide “vouchers” for sources because he had spent years combing the countryside for such evidence. Primary materials known to have been in his possession included the seventeenth-century journal of the Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop and seven volumes of correspondence gathered by the Reverend John Mather between 1632 and 1689. Prince’s most dramatic “find” may well have been Governor William Bradford’s handwritten copy of his History of Plimoth Plantation. On the flyleaf, Prince penned in a detailed explanation of how he came by the manuscript and carefully noted that the lawful owner, the Colonial governor’s grandson, had agreed that the journal should go to the New England Library. Just to avoid any ambiguity, Prince pasted in one of his own bookplates. More than a century later, in 1855, Bradford’s journal was discovered among papers that had been stored for decades in London’s Fulham Palace. Nobody could say how it got there, though a number of intriguing possibilities have been suggested. But Prince’s inscription, next to his bookplate, was sufficient evidence for the argument that the document rightfully belonged in Boston, not Great Britain. In 1897, the manuscript—by then known as the Log of the Mayflower—was finally presented to the Governor of Massachusetts by the British ambassador to the United States.
That such a crucial historic document could disappear without a trace came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the checkered history of Prince’s New England Library; what was astonishing was that it had survived at all. When Thomas Prince died in 1758, he left specific instructions that all his books should become the property of the Old South Church. Sixteen years later, on the eve of the American Revolution, the library was said by the Reverend Jeremy Belknap to be “lying in a most shamefully chaotic state.” When British forces laid siege to rebellious Boston in 1775, the Old South Church—where thousands of citizens had rallied against the Stamp Act and where the Boston Tea Party had been planned—was seized and used as a riding school. During the winter that followed, the pulpit and pews were broken up to fuel the stoves. One legend holds that some books and manuscripts were hauled down from the library in the steeple and used as kindling. Other material simply vanished, and tantalizing items like Bradford’s Plymouth journal kept turning up from time to time in distant places.
In an article published in The Boston Patriot on October 23, 1811, John Adams wrote how he recently had “mounted up to the balcony” to the steeple chamber of the Old South Church “where was assembled a collection which Mr. Prince had devoted himself” to making. Adams said, “such a treasure never existed anywhere else and can never again be made.” When the Adams library, consisting of about three thousand volumes, was given to the Boston Public Library in 1893, an inventory found that two of the second president’s books had Old South Church bookplates affixed inside. “It seems probable that in one or more of his visits to this balcony, Mr. Adams borrowed these volumes and failed to return them,” the cataloguer concluded.
If Adams did take
a few volumes, it could well be because he was appalled by what he saw. A year after he wrote about his visit to the steeple chamber, a committee appointed by the church reported the Prince library to be in “a very ruinous situation,” with some boxes “broken to pieces, others uncovered and the books partly taken out and laying about the floor, trodden over and covered with dust.” After spending the next half century in various shelters, the books finally were placed on deposit in the Boston Public Library.
A catalogue prepared in 1847 showed that the Prince library had owned as many as six Bay Psalm Books—only eleven are known to exist today—and that five were in the collection at that time. Prince probably swapped the sixth for something else. When the materials finally went over to the public library in 1866, three of the others were gone as well. In 1903, the bibliographer Wilberforce Eames showed how those copies were sold or traded by church deacons to three collectors: Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, George Livermore, and Edward A. Crowninshield. The Shurtleff copy is now at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, and the Livermore copy made its way to the Library of Congress. The vicissitudes of the Crowninshield copy are another matter altogether.
At Crowinshield’s death in 1860, Henry Stevens of Vermont (1819–1886), the preeminent bookseller of his generation, bought the book and offered it to the British Museum for £150. Getting a negative response there, he then sold the book to George Brinley of Hartford, Connecticut, for the higher price of 150 guineas. At Brinley’s sale in 1879, the railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt paid $1,500 for the book, and from him it passed to his daughter, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Mrs. Whitney asked the New York bookseller Max Harzoff to estimate the value of her delicate little treasure. Before attempting an answer, Harzoff glanced thoughtfully out the balcony window of the grande dame’s Fifth Avenue apartment. “What is that worth, madame?” he said finally, waving his hand at Central Park. From Mrs. Whitney’s library it was sold at auction to Dr. A. S. W. Rosenbach in 1941 for $151,000, whence it found a permanent home at Yale University, the gift of Mrs. Edward S. Harkness.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 18