The Printed Materials Department is an active research library housing an extensive collection centering on the history, research interests, and activities of members of the American Philosophical Society. Although it is not primarily dedicated to rare books, through over two hundred and fifty years of intensive collecting, the library has acquired a number of rare and hard to find materials, and is today one of the nation's great collections for study of the history of science and technology during the past three centuries.
The American Philosophical Society's book collections began to coalesce in 1803 with the appointment of its first Librarian, John Vaughan. An ardent collector, Vaughan's interests extended particularly to scholarly journals and monographs and to political and economic pamphlets. During his tenure, he established intellectual ties and exchanges with learned societies throughout Europe and the Americas, expanding the collections in the process, and he gradually transformed the collecting focus from the natural and physical sciences to the social sciences - linguistics, ethnography, and travel and exploration. The collections continue to reflect this history of the individual interests of the Society's Librarians, combined with the interests and activities of its members.
Today the Printed Materials Department houses nearly 275,000 volumes, ranging from scarce scholarly and scientific periodicals to works on electricity, the production of sugar, the history and languages of Native Americans, "pseudoscience," exploration of the west and the arctic, and, of course, works by A.P.S. members such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, John and William Bartram, Thomas Jefferson, Charles Darwin, and Franz Boas. The oldest work in the Department is Seneca's Opera Moralia (Treviso, 1478), however the holdings are concentrated in the period after 1750. Several extensive microform sets -- including the Landmarks of Science (approximately 4,000 major scientific works from antiquity to the present) and the Evans and Shaw and Shoemaker bibliographies (works published in America prior to 1820) -- increase the research value of the collections.
Access to the book collections
VOLE: the Vaughan On-line catalogue [1] of printed materials at the APS contains bibliographic records for all books, periodicals, and other printed materials held in the Library's collections, in many cases including records for individual journal articles.
Access to the holdings is further facilitated through selected specialized bibliographies. Among the works that survey the book collections of the APS are:
- Anita Guerrini
Natural history and the New World, 1524-1770 [2]
(Philadelphia: APS, 1986)
- Cornelia S. King
American Education, 1622-1860
(N.Y. : Garland, 1984)
- Cornelia S. King
American Philanthropy, 1731-1860
(N.Y. : Garland, 1984)
- Andrea J. Tucher
Agriculture in America, 1622-1860
(N.Y. : Garland, 1984)
- Andrea J. Tucher
Natural History in America, 1609-1860
(N.Y. : Garland, 1985)
Graphics
In addition to textual materials, the Printed Materials Department also contains a substantial amount of graphics holdings [3]. Much of this material is available online in the Library's Digital Collections [4]. Particularly noteworthy is the collection of Benjamin Franklin and Frankliniana [5].
Reference inquiries
Requests for reference assistance or other inquiries may be addressed to the Curator at books [at] amphilsoc [dot] org, by e-mail, phone, or surface mail to:
Printed Materials Department Reference
American Philosophical Society Library
105 South Fifth Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106-3386