$4.5m Estimate for Major Benjamin Franklin Collection Auction

More than 155 items related to Benjamin Franklin including printed ephemera, books, letters, newspapers, almanacs, and manuscripts will go under the hammer next month at the Sotheby’s The Jay T. Snider Collection of Benjamin Franklin sale.

With a combined estimate of $3 – 4.5 million, the auction house describes the collection as "the greatest private assembly of Benjamin Franklin material ever to come to auction" and has unveiled highlights from it in a special exhibition at the Library Company of Philadelphia May 7. It will then travel to New York for exhibition at Sotheby’s New York June 20–24. 

“I have collected rare Americana for 46 years," said entrepreneur, executive and philanthropist Jay T. Snider, "and my greatest joy was in studying the most remarkable American Benjamin Franklin and reconstructing his life through this collection."

Organized in chronological order, the sale will trace Franklin’s career from his earliest years as a printer, through his work as a book and almanac publisher, civic leader and scientist, postmaster, diplomat, man of letters and elder statesman. 

Leading the sale is a group of materials documenting the friendship in Franklin's later years with Mary 'Polly' Stevenson whom he first met in 1757 when he took lodgings in the London home of her mother during his first diplomatic mission to England. Over the following three decades, more than 150 letters passed between them. She is thought to have visited his bedside when he died in Philadelphia in 1790. Items include: 

• a signed autograph letter to Polly (Philadelphia, March 22, 1762
), last seen in 1920, in which Franklin writes to Polly about her studies, and includes a brief passage on electricity (estimate: $35,000–$50,000)
• another signed autograph letter to her (April 13, 1782
) mostly on domestic topics, and looking forward to seeing “Peace & Good Will restored between our Countries" (estimate: $20,000–$30,000)
• a Polly Stevenson signed autograph, as Mary Hewson, to Franklin (Cheam, July 31, 1785) 
alluding to her planned emigration to America (estimate: $2,000–$3,000)

Other highlights from the auction include:

* Experiments and Observations on Electricity, first editions bound in contemporary marbled boards (London, E. Cave, 1751, 1753, 1754) of all three parts of the treatise that established him as one of the foremost scientific minds of his age (estimate: $75,000–$125,000)

* one of the earliest letters by Franklin to survive, signed to John Ladd (Philadelphia, 12 June 1738) about the recipient's purchase of books from Franklin's shop (estimate: $40,000–$60,000)

* Pennsylvania General Loan Office Mortgage Register (Philadelphia: Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith, 1729), a volume of partly printed mortgage forms representing Franklin’s first government printing job, serving as the official record of the mortgages that backed the 1729 Pennsylvania currency emission, and bound in a contemporary paneled calf attributed to William Davies (estimate: $150,000–$200,000)
 
* Pennsylvania Hospital Promissory Notes 1751–1754 and 1764–1798 - Franklin was among the founders of the Pennsylvania Hospital, established in 1751 as the first hospital in the American colonies, and this group of 347 promissory notes documents the financial infrastructure that sustained the institution (estimate: $150,000–$200,000)
 
* a signed autograph letter from Franklin (London, June 10, 1758) written from London during his first diplomatic mission to England, reporting to his chief ally Joseph Galloway on his progress representing the Pennsylvania Assembly against the interests of the colonial Proprietors, Thomas and Richard Penn, who insisted their estates be exempt from taxation (estimate: $70,000–$100,000)
 
* a 1787 signed autograph letter from Franklin to leading French Enlightenment  intellectual Abbé André Morellet Philadelphia reflecting on his return to America and addressing subjects including taxation and the Declaration of Independence (estimate: $80,000–$120,000)

Also going under the hammer from the 1730s is one of the rarest imprints Franklin produced and among the earliest books printed in German in the British colonies, Vorspiel der Neuen-Welt by Conrad Beissel, bound with his Jacobs Kampff- und Ritter-Platz (estimate: $70,000–100,000). Beissel was the spiritual leader and music director of the Ephrata community, a German-speaking religious settlement he founded in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania in 1732, and Franklin was among the few printers in the colonies equipped to serve its literary needs.  

The auction follows the sale of a letter from the collection in January during Sotheby’s  Fine Manuscript and Printed Americana Auction written by George Washington to Benjamin Franklin, introducing the Marquis de Lafayette, and which sold for $1m.