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.

The Welsh non-conformist minister Richard Price (1723-1791) was a moral philosopher and political and economic theorist whose ideas leant support to the American cause during the Revolution. Of broad and liberal mind, he was an integral member of the intellectual coterie surrounding William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne, and was a founding member of the Unitarian Church. Befitting a latitudinarian thinker, the range of Richard Price's correspondence is extremely broad, touching upon his rationalistic philosophy and dissenting theology, his political views on British politics, America and the American Revolution, the Constitutional settlement, the future of the United States, social reform, demography, prisons, and slavery. The ninety letters in the collection are arranged chronologically, with correspondents including Charles Chauncy (8 letters, 1772-1779), Benjamin Franklin (7 letters, 1775-1789), John Howard (11 letters and a biographical manuscript, 1770-1789), Thomas Jefferson (3 letters, 1785-1789), Benjamin Rush (8 letters, 1786-1790), and Edward Wigglesworth (3 letters, 1775-1786), as well as lesser known figures such as the reformer John Howard.