19 reels. Accompanied by a guide. Correspondence, letter books, copy books, journals, and other official business and personal papers chiefly of Henry Laurens (1724-1792), a wealthy South Carolina merchant and planter, Revolutionary leader, member and president of Congress, British prisoner of war, peace commissioner, and elder statesman. Also includes papers of his son, John Laurens (1754-1782), an officer in the Continental Army, aide-de-camp to Washington, and special envoy to France. Originals are in the South Carolina Historical Society.

Since publication of I. Minis Hays's Calendar of the Papers of Benjamin Franklin in 1908, the APS Library has acquired a large number of miscellaneous letters and other documents relating to the life, mind, and work of Franklin and his immediate family. The collections listed in this finding aid consist of letters and documents to and from Franklin organized into groupings based upon provenance or focal point. The largest grouping consists of miscellaneous materials acquired individually or in small groups over the years, including a number of important individual items. The other collections consist largely of correspondence between Franklin and individual friends and colleagues, including his friends Mme Brillon, Mary "Polly" Stevenson Hewson, and Catherine Ray Greene, the Whig agriculturist Richard Jackson, and the printer Francis Childs. The collections include photostats of selected materials held by other institutions or that were in private hands. These are available for reference only.

An important 18th century radical republican theorist and political writer, Thomas Paine was a leading figure in the American Revolution. Despite his humble beginnings and lack of formal education, his reasoned and persuasive writings not only influenced nascent American republican ideology, but profoundly affected the perception of government in England and France as well. His three most influential works are Common Sense (1776), The Rights of Man (1791-1792), and The Age of Reason (1794, 1795, 1807). The Richard Gimbel Collection is a heterogeneous mix of items connected only by the fact that they were all collected by Gimbel (1898-1970) and that most were written by, to, or about the revolutionary Paine. Of primary importance are the approximately sixty-five letters or manuscripts in Paine's own hand, including Paine's 1776 manuscript notes for Common Sense, his letter of January 10, 1781, in which he takes leave of his former commanding officer, Nathanael Greene, and his January 6, 1789 letter to Kitty Nicholson Few, in which he writes of his view of matrimony and other personal matters. The collection includes a series of correspondence between Thomas Paine and Samuel Adams, which were originally marked "forgeries," these appear instead simply to be the letters of two men bearing famous names.