The Soiferman Collection · Eighteenth-century Philadelphia
Three volumes, told through the objects
Each catalog is a narrative history with the collection running through it — chapters you read, with the books, manuscripts, and objects appearing where the story reaches them. Printed, they are the catalogs. Read here, every object opens.
The city that made the republic, in the paper and objects it made itself.
Between Franklin's arrival in 1723 and Rush's death in 1813, Philadelphia was the largest city in British America, then the capital of the United States, and throughout the center of American printing, medicine, and natural philosophy. The Soiferman Collection is built on the two men who defined it: the printer who became the electrical philosopher and the statesman, and the physician he sent to Edinburgh, who came home to teach three thousand students, sign the Declaration, and bleed a city through the worst epidemic in its history.
The collection holds things that exist nowhere else in private hands — Franklin's earliest surviving almanac, a Liberty Tree lantern, Rush's own Boerhaave with his bookplate, the rarest of his pamphlets — and it holds them in context: the bond forms and hospital notes and session laws that surround the famous objects with the ordinary ones. It is catalogued in full, photographed, and open to researchers. It can be cited.
