Benjamin Franklin’s Paper Trail Heads to Sotheby’s With a $4.5 Million Estimate
A sweeping archive of Benjamin Franklin material assembled by collector Jay Snider is set to come to market at Sotheby’s New York on June 24, with an estimate of $3 million to $4.5 million. The sale includes more than 150 items — among them letters, books, broadsides, manuscripts, and related documents — that chart Franklin’s life across print, science, diplomacy, and civic leadership.
The collection’s range is part of its appeal. One of the most notable lots is a June 10, 1758 letter from Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Galloway, then a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, in which Franklin described the state of his negotiations in England. It is estimated at $70,000 to $100,000. Before the auction, 40 artifacts from the group will be on view at the Library Company of Philadelphia from May 5 to 7.
Snider’s holdings also include roughly 350 promissory notes tied to the founding of Pennsylvania Hospital, an institution Franklin helped establish. The notes reflect a practical side of Franklin’s public life: not only the celebrated thinker and diplomat, but also the organizer who helped build the infrastructure of civic Philadelphia. The collection is estimated at $150,000 to $200,000.
Another section focuses on Franklin’s scientific work. His correspondence with Peter Collinson, the English botanist and horticulturist, helped circulate Franklin’s experiments with lightning rods and charged clouds. Between 1751 and 1754, those letters were published in three parts in London, and the bound set in this sale is priced at $75,000 to $125,000. The writings were later recognized as foundational to Franklin’s election to the Royal Society.
The archive also reaches into Franklin’s personal life. More than 150 letters between Franklin and Mary “Polly” Stevenson are included, with estimates ranging from $2,000 to $50,000. The two met in 1757, when Franklin lodged at her mother’s London home, and their correspondence continued for more than 30 years. Stevenson later moved to Philadelphia and was at Franklin’s bedside when he died in 1790.
Interest in Franklin material has already been tested at auction. In late January, a 1778 letter from George Washington to Franklin introducing Marquis de Lafayette sold at Sotheby’s Americana auction for just over $1 million. Snider, who spent nearly five decades collecting Americana, has described the project as an effort to reconstruct Franklin’s life through the objects he left behind — a fitting ambition for a figure whose influence still stretches across American history.
