"He was shocked to see that the first such letter was a copy of one written by Benjamin Franklin to the secretary of the governor of Maryland. He had never seen the missive before. Houston believed he'd seen everything Franklin ever wrote, but he quickly checked his own files as well as the authoritative 'Papers of Benjamin Franklin' and saw no mention of it. Riffling through the other letters in the volume--of which 18 were written by Franklin--he realized that they were all unknown to historians.
"'I felt kind of a lump in my chest,' Houston said. 'I started to bounce. I wanted like a rocket to shoot out of my chair.'
"It being a library, he merely exited the room and called his wife with the news."
Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post (in the Chicago Tribune) reports on the discovery in the British Library of previously unknown copies of letters written by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s.
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