Franklin: The Quest for Paper Copies

[beamjockey]

You may recall my entry about Ben Franklin's book Experiments and Observations on Electricity. Just checked the reliable abebooks. The book is remarkably scarce. My choices are:

1. The Octavo Press CD-ROM facsimile, about $25;

2. The Octavo Press fancy super-scholarly ultra-facsimile, on three CD-ROMs, for $225;

3. Original copies, starting around $8000.

You'd think someone would have put an inexpensive edition into print, sometime in the past two and a half centuries. Else maybe the book is not as important as I thought.

Guess I'll hit a library. If I like the book enough, maybe I'll buy the CD-ROM...

Comments

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

Does this help any?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Very much, thank you! Your prowess at finding cool stuff on the Net continues to delight me.

Note: This text is intended to be accessible, but does not pretend to be a scholarly edition of Franklin's electrical experiments. I defer to Cohen and to the Yale University Press editions for that. However, the material reproduced here is offered free of copyright, as my intent is to make Franklin's fascinating writing on electricity available to all. I would ask you to do the courtesy of acknowledging the source if you use the material presented here in other publications.

Robert A. Morse, Physics Master, St. Albans School, Washington DC

All hail Robert A. Morse, open-source hero of physics!

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

I tend to work on the assumption that neat cruft accumulates at Wiki, and lo and behold it usually has...

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

Here's a pdf (http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/Chem-History/Franklin-1749/Franklin-1749-00.pdf) from a web site (http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/Chem-History/Classic-Papers-Menu.html) that has classic papers in the history of chemistry.

[shimgray.livejournal.com]

That's just the title page, though... here's the set.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

There's always interlibrary loan--lots of listings in Worldcat. You could scan the pages (esp. if a facsimile edition) and ship them off to Distributed Proofreaders for eventual induction into Project Gutenburg.

All in your copious spare time, of course.

[gypsy1969.livejournal.com]

Gack! for those prices you could hire someone to transcribe it and give you an in-depth analysis of it.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Morse's bibliographic notes suggest that I probably overlooked copies of the tome embedded in various multi-volume collections of Franklin's writings.

[orangemike.livejournal.com]

Do you want me to look around at Renaissance for such a set?