Ben Franklin: Now Sage

Last November, this column carried the article entitled “Ben Franklin Did This Too?”. It was about the young Ben Franklin, then in his twenties, the Junto Club that he organized in those early years, the first-ever-in-America subscription Library that grew out of that, and the resulting incorporation of it as the Library Company of Philadelphia, still in existence today. Just a smattering of all that this giant did in a lifetime, and yet he did it. That was the point. Well, with respect to Libraries, he was not done. Again referring to Walter Isaacson’s “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” (2003), late in life Franklin rivaled Thomas Jefferson in having his own personal collection of thousands of books. I have previously written numerous times about Jefferson’s Monticello Library, wh…