PHILADELPHIA (AP) – A huge but often delicate effort is under way to restore Benjamin Franklin’s books for an exhibit marking the 300th anniversary of his birth.

The exhibit, with stops in five cities including Boston, is scheduled to open in Philadelphia in October 2005.

The deadline keeps Shelly Smith, a paper conservator, awake at night wondering how to approach the tricky task of restoring the lone surviving copy of the 1733 first printing of Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Historians say the work established Franklin’s folksy wit, through proverbs such as: “Fish & visitors stink in three days” and “Men and melons are hard to know” -and the less familiar “Never mind it, she’ll be sober after the Holidays.”

More than 200 of Franklin’s books, papers, paintings and inventions will be included in the show, titled “B. Franklin 300,” which commemorates his birth on Jan. 17, 1706.

Franklin was 27 when he wrote the first almanac, and continued the annual exercise for a quarter century, adopting the pseudonym Poor Richard Saunders. The 1753 edition carried a full report on his kite-and-key experiments with electricity.

“The Almanack helped create Franklin’s public persona as a sort of pithy sage, and shrewdly humorous,” said Elizabeth E. Fuller, librarian of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.

where the Almanack usually resides in a humidity-controlled archives room. “It helped make him a celebrity, as opposed to a scientist and a public figure.”

Smith’s strategy for cleaning its rag pages might inspire dread in the uninitiated. Placing each of the 24 pages between layers of soft mesh, she bathed them in a tub of water to draw out the smoke, sulfur and other acidic pollutants that have accumulated over 271 years.

“It can be pretty shocking when you have to do something like this,” Smith acknowledged.

Then she went to work on the apparent rodent damage on the book’s spine, filling in the missing bites with Japanese paper.

The exhibit will also include the bifocals that Franklin invented, a chest of his Leyden jars (primitive electrical batteries), and his armonica, or glass harmonica, an instrument comprised of variously sized glass bowls that are spun on an axle and played with a wet finger.

The show will also make stops in Paris, Denver and Atlanta.

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On the Net:

Rosenbach Museum and Library: http://www.rosenbach.org

AP-ES-07-11-04 1708EDT