Antiques.(Benjamin Franklin)(Brief article)

 
[The Library Company of Philadelphia] was the Mother of all the N 
American Subscription Libraries now so numerous. 
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (1964) 

In the decades before 1776 Philadelphians fashioned a society in which men of ambition could flourish and where a clever lad, regardless of breeding or antecedents, had a good chance to succeed. In this, his adopted city, Benjamin Franklin found fame and fortune because of his ability, not his name. He described how he had "emerg'd from the Poverty and Obscurity in which I was born and bred, to a State of Affluence and some Degree of Reputation in the World." Among his many accomplishments was to launch a subscription library in 1731, which became the Library Company of Philadelphia, the subject of the pages that follow.

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Conspicuously absent from the list of founding subscribers was James Logan, one of the most learned men in America. ...