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Article Excerpt
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Regular readers of this column know how fond I am of quotations, particularly those from my all-time favorite authors, like Benjamin Franklin, America's first and still greatest "great man." Franklin was an inventor who, some 217 years after his death, has at least two inventions still selling briskly--bifocals and the Franklin stove; a man famed even in his own time for his scientific discoveries in electricity; a diplomat so savvy that he could get the French nobility to support a cause that would lead to their own destruction only a decade later; a wildly successful publisher and entrepreneur, a Founding Father of the United States; and a very, very funny guy. Remember his wry, fear-defusing witticism at the signing of the Declaration of Independence, "We must, indeed, all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately."
But Franklin had another accomplishment. He founded the first successful public subscription library in America. The Library Company of Philadelphia [http://www.librarycompany.org] was established by Franklin and 49 other subscribers in July 1731....
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