Colorplate books in the collection

The ingenious heart of Benjamin Franklin's concept for the Library Company of Philadelphia was that its members collectively would have the use of a library far larger and richer than any of them could afford individually. In its early days, the members were working-men with limited means who wanted value for their money. They tended to order books that were not only useful but also inexpensive; or if they were expensive, they had to be useful in proportion. The most expensive books of all at that time were colorplate books, that is books with many full-page etchings or engravings each individually hand-colored. Not surprisingly, there were no such books in the Library Company's first book order sent from London in 1732. The total cost, including shipping, for the 141 volumes with which the library began was forty-five pounds, an average of just over six shillings a volume. The first order included a few folios with uncolored engravings, but getting them hand-colored was evidently not deemed worth the cost. (1)

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The Library Company ordered its first colorplate book in 1752, the second edition of Mark Catesby's Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, which was just about to be published. If the city's public library was to have one outrageously expensive book, this was the one. Ever since the first volume of the first edition (1731-1743) had appeared in 1731, it had become an essential work on American natural history. Philadelphia's own John Bartram (1699-1777) had sent specimens to Catesby and was one of the original subscribers. The Library Company's order, however, was not filled. Their London agent did not send it because, he wrote, "it is a very dear Book (no less than [pounds sterling]18)." (2) Then in 1772, hearing that a third edition had appeared, the directors wrote to Benjamin Franklin in London asking if he could secure them a copy. This time their order was filled (see Fig. 3). (3)

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In the meantime the library's directors had persisted in their desire for books with colored pictures. In 1763 they ordered through the eminent English naturalist Peter Collinson (1694-1768) two much smaller and cheaper colorplate books, George Edwards's Gleanings of Natural History of 1758 (see Fig. 4) and Moses Harris's Aurelian; or, Natural History of English Insects (London, 1766). (4) Collinson was a subscriber for both books, and Bartram was a contributor and subscriber to Edwards's. These were the first colorplate books in the Library Company, and they show all the signs of heavy use.

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In the same 1772 shipment with the Catesby volumes came a seminal work on neoclassicism, the monumental catalogue of the collection of William Hamilton (1730-1803)--Antiquites Etrusques, Grecques, et Romaines (Naples, 1766-1767). It is not exactly a colorplate book, but it includes many engravings of Grecian urns printed in black on a sepia ground. As soon as the Catesby and Hamilton volumes arrived in Philadelphia, the directors placed them on the library's first list of noncirculating materials, along with a hand from an Egyptian mummy (a gift from Benjamin West), a thirteenth-century Bible, and (having learned their lesson too late) the now battered copies of Edwards and Harris. (5)

After the 1772 splurge, the Library Company appears not to have bought another colorplate book for more than thirty years. First the American Revolution halted importations of all kinds, and after the war the Library Company refashioned itself as the de facto national library in an era of republican virtue and suspicion of luxury, at least in a public institution. Thus when William Russell Birch (1755-1834) published his series of stunning views, The City of Philadelphia, in 1800, the Library Company was not among the initial 150-odd subscribers, even though fifty of its members and five of its directors were. Birch's twenty-eight folio prints, in many copies beautifully finished with watercolor, displayed to advantage every aspect of the city's architecture, commerce, and street life. Birch placed special emphasis on its civic institutions, and one plate was devoted to the Library Company's recently completed building, across the street from the State House (see p. 59, Fig. 3). (6) Even so, the Library Company did not acquire Birch's views until the 1850s, when librarian John Jay Smith (1798-1881) gave a set of restrikes from the original copperplates, commissioned by the antiquary John McAllister Jr. (1786-1877). (7) These men were then busy commissioning photographs of old buildings about to be demolished and watercolors of the city as they remembered it. Birch's views finally became useful as documents of local history fifty years after they were published. (8)

Just as Birch's views were coming off the press, the federal government moved to Washington, D.C., and the Library Company ceased to serve as the national library. Perhaps as a result, the institution began to turn inward and attend more to the tastes of its shareholders. Meanwhile the library's membership had been changing. Some artisan families still bought shares in the spirit of Franklinian self-improvement, but many of the old shareholding families had risen on the social scale. This more elite membership was still attracted by the idea of collective ownership of books they could not afford individually, but that threshold of affordability was now considerably higher. Their tastes now ran to books that were beautiful as well as useful, and sometimes to books that were merely beautiful. This trend can be seen as early as 1804, when the spring order included one of the most elaborate and influential colorplate books of the age, Humphry Repton's Observations on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening of 1803, invoiced at [pounds sterling]15.15.6 (see Figs. 5a and 5b). (9) Repton charmed his English clients with watercolors equipped with moveable flaps showing before-and-after views of his proposed improvements. When published as a book, these drawings, including the flaps, were rendered in delicately colored aquatint. Philadelphians were charmed too, and they put the book to good use in planning their increasingly modish gardens.