Enfilade

View of the exhibition The Most Formidable Weapon against Errors: The Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection and the Age of Reason, as installed at Princeton’s Firestone Library, 2025.

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Now on view at Princeton:

The Most Formidable Weapon against Errors

The Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection and the Age of Reason

Firestone Library, Princeton University, 19 February — 8 June 2025

Curated by Steven Knowlton

Thinking of the start of his long career as a collector of rare books, Sid Lapidus recalled, “My first antiquarian book was purchased in 1959. In a bookseller’s dusty window, I noticed a small book, a 1792 edition of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. The principal theme of my collection was even embedded in the title of [this first purchase].”

That principal theme is the documenting of new conceptions of human liberty, political order, and scientific reasoning that emerged in the Anglo-American intellectual world between the 17th and 19th centuries. It resulted in a large book collection now dispersed in libraries on the East Coast. This exhibition attempts to provide an overview of Sid Lapidus’s overall achievement.

• Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
• Thomas Paine, Rights of Man
• The Stamp Act Crisis
• Slavery and Emancipation
• Jewish Oppression and Liberation in England and the United States
• Medicine
• Astronomy and Atomic Science

A dedicated philanthropist, Lapidus has donated his books to several libraries, including Princeton University Library, the American Antiquarian Society, the Wolf Law Library at William & Mary Law School, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Center for Jewish History, the New York Historical, and the New York University Health Sciences Library. His contributions have strengthened the existing collections at those libraries, helping create collections of research value, with works that often are in conversation with one another.

The entire Sid Lapidus ’59 Collection on Liberty and the American Revolution in Princeton University Library has been digitized. You’re invited to browse or search within the collection here»