Benjamin Franklin: PRINTER and PUBLISHER

JOHN T. WINTERICH

From Early American Books and Printing by John T. Winterich. Copyright 1935 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd., agent.

Josiah Franklin was reared a dyer in the village of Ecton in Northamptonshire, but soon after his arrival in America, about 1682, he foresaw a greater future in the trade of tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. It was a calling which seems humble enough in a day that has evolved such mouth-filling occupational designations as sales engineer, merchandising counsel, and mortician. Josiah Franklin, had the locution been available in his era, might have asserted with all accuracy that he was an important factor in public utilities—even our own catch-phrase epoch has not been quite equal to the coinage of the label "public utilitarian." For when the Boston town watch wanted fresh candles they bought them from Josiah Franklin—from other tallow-chandlers too, perhaps, but at least some, by documentary evidence, from Josiah Franklin.

The close relationship between progress in the science of artificial illumination and progress in the dissemination of the printed word could be charted with almost mathematical accuracy.... Most of the books of colonial days were designed for the use of those whose professions exacted some considerable amount of "required reading"—ministers, physicians, lawyers, public officials, schoolmen. The man who toiled with his hands (and hands are eminently useful in the building-up of a new country) labored while the light of heaven would let him and then returned to a home wherein the conveniences were hardly such as to make reading a pleasure. Lincoln studied by the glare of blazing pine-knots, but the middle-class Bostonian and New Yorker and Philadelphian of the generations immediately preceding Lincoln (to say nothing of their country cousins) had to depend on illuminants that offered no greater inducements to either the solace or the benefits of type.

Josiah Franklin's wife and their three children accompanied him to America. Before her death she bore him three more children. Josiah remarried, and of the second union ten children were born. Of this multitudinous offspring thirteen grew to maturity—a remarkable proportion for the time and region. The eighth child and last son of the second marriage, christened Benjamin after a paternal uncle, was at first intended for the Church, but Josiah could not afford to give him the education which this most learned of the professions demanded, and at the age of ten, after receiving as thorough an intellectual rearing as could be expected in so short a space, Benjamin Franklin quit school to assist his father in the fabrication of candles and soap. An elder brother, John, had already become proficient in the twin arts of illumination and sanitation and had gone to the bustling colony of Rhode Island to practice them. Another brother (and another Josiah) had also investigated them, found them not to his liking, and run away to sea.

Benjamin, also, made it clear that the parental pursuits were not to taste, and a wise father, fearing another abrupt departure, took Benjamin walking about Boston, that he might "see joiners, bricklayers, turners, braziers, etc., at their work" and thereby, boywise, make known to his elder which way his inclinations lay. A patent leaning toward books at length persuaded the father to make him a printer, despite the fact that another brother, James, Benjamin's elder by nine years ... had adopted the craft. Benjamin conceded a preference to the claims of printing over those of tallow-chandlery, but he still sniffed, with the true landsman's appetite, the tang of the salt breeze that blew in from the east. Josiah, however, was insistent, and the parental insistence of 1718 was no toy scepter to swing above the head of a sub-adolescent boy. Accordingly, Benjamin was duly indentured to James "to serve as an apprentice till I was twenty-one years of age, only I was to be allowed journeyman's wages during the last year."

Before long, Benjamin was writing odds and ends of verse, and James, with the inbred Franklin sagacity, encouraged him in his endeavors and let him put some of his compositions in type.

One (declared Benjamin) was called The Lighthouse Tragedy, and contained an account of the drowning of Captain Worthilake, with his two daughters: the other was a sailor's song, on the taking of Teach (or Blackbeard) the pirate. They were wretched stuff, in the Grub-street-ballad style; and when they were printed he sent me about the town to sell them. The first sold wonderfully, the event being recent, having made a great noise. This flattered my vanity; but my father discouraged me by ridiculing my performances, and telling me verse-makers were generally beggars.

The importance of these two pieces consists in the fact that they were "the first with which Franklin's name can be identified as either author or printer," according to Dr. William J. Campbell, who adds that "no copy is known to exist, nor is the exact title of either of them known." This was true in 1918, when Dr. Campbell's admirable catalogue of The Collection of Franklin Imprints in the Museum of the Curtis Publishing Company was issued, and it is unfortunately still true today [1935]. If they were at all like similar productions of both earlier and later date, they were broadsides—single sheets that were distributed like handbills, the main difference being that they commanded a price. They would command a fantastic price today, together or singly, and their eventual discovery is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility. A copy of one—or copies of both—may be tucked away in some forgotten contemporary theological compendium which has not been opened for a century.

The disappearance of these broadsides is regrettable on many counts, not least of which is the fact that even if Benjamin had never accomplished anything else, he could at least claim credit for sponsoring perhaps the most textually interesting productions of his brother's press. James Franklin was a skilled printer—London trained, and "no slovenly self-taught colonial," in Paul Leicester Ford's phrase—and James was not, of course, in any degree responsible for the dullness of the copy that was brought to his shop. A brief glance at a few of his imprints of this period is of interest mainly because of the certainty that Benjamin worked on many of them.

The product of James Franklin's press (says Ford in The Many-Sided Franklin, New York, 1899) is a dreary lot of "gone-nothing-ness." A few of the New England sermons of the day; Stoddard's Treatise on Conversion; Stone's Short Catechism; A Prefatory Letter about Psalmody, in defense of church singing, which many Puritans still held to be unholy; an allegory styled The Isle of Man, or, Legal Proceedings in Manshire Against Sin; Care's English Liberties; sundry pamphlets on the local politics of the moment, such as A Letter from One in the Country to his Friend in Boston, News from the Moon, A Friendly Check from a Kind Relation to the Chief Cannonneer, and A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country; two or three tractates on inoculation, and one aimed half at the Boston clergy and half at the fair sex, entitled Hooped Petticoats Arraigned by the Light of Nature and the Law of God, were the chief output of the new printer during the years his brother served him.

In the summer of 1721, James Franklin established a newspaper, The New England Courant. Two years earlier he had been engaged to print the Boston Gazette, but with the transfer of its management a few months later the contract had gone elsewhere. The Courant was a new departure even for the novelty that was American journalism—so extensive and violent a departure, indeed, that in the following year the authorities sentenced the printer-proprietor to a month's imprisonment for his insolence. The punishment did not improve him; free again, he pressed the thorn of the Courant deeper into the flesh of his persecutors, with the consequence that he was soon forbidden "to print or publish" either the Courant "or any other pamphlet or paper of the like nature" unless it were first submitted to the secretary of the province.

There were two apparent ways out of the dilemma, and one was as eminently unsatisfactory as the other. The first was to quit printing and publishing. The second was to submit to the censorship. James hit upon a more ingenious solution. He turned the Courant over to sixteen-year-old Benjamin. Benjamin's indentures as apprentice to James had five years to run, and in order to forestall any objection on the part of the authorities that an apprentice was not competent to manage the paper, the indentures were ostentatiously canceled and a new document drawn up as a private and confidential (but none the less binding) memorandum which in theory was no one's affair save James's and Benjamin's. The half-sheet issue of the Courant for February 4-11, 1723, identified it as "printed and sold by Benjamin Franklin in Queen Street, where Advertisements are taken in." Benjamin Franklin's name thus first appeared in an imprint. It remained on the tail-board of the Courant until the paper's discontinuance in 1726, long after Benjamin had left Boston.

The gratifying tableau of two stalwart brothers battling loyally side by side for freedom of the press, however, was not the whole picture. James and Benjamin had differences, and Benjamin later admitted that he himself was "perhaps ... too saucy and provoking," and that James, despite "the blows his passion too often urged him to bestow upon me," was "otherwise not an ill-natur'd man." Benjamin, at all events, decided to take advantage of the freedom accorded him by the cancellation of his indentures, which act he later conceded to have been "not fair" and "one of the first errata of my life." James spread the tidings of this perfidy throughout Boston, and every local printing establishment thereupon became a closed shop to Benjamin Franklin.

If James assumed that Benjamin would thus be forced to return to his own shop, he reckoned without his Benjamin. For not long thereafter, with the connivance of a friend, John Collins, Benjamin was smuggled aboard a New York-bound sloop, and three days later, thanks to a fair wind, he was in a city which was not yet a metropolis judged even by easy colonial standards. He called on "old Mr. William Bradford" (aged sixty), who had nothing to offer, but who suggested that his son Andrew, then flourishing (after a fashion) in Philadelphia, might have a position for him, since Andrew's "principal hand," Aquila Rose, had just died.

Franklin set out by water by way of Perth Amboy. It is interesting to note, in view of the dispute regarding the earliest New Jersey imprint ... that the trip from New York to the New Jersey port took thirty hours. All in good time he reached Philadelphia.

Washington did not cut down a cherry tree and then inform his father that he could not tell a lie; Wellington did not say "Up, Guards, and at 'em!" or Pershing, "Lafayette, we are here." The dear old legends explode all about us; it is gratifying to recall that there is one at least the accuracy of which is unimpeachable. Walking up Market Street, Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin did pass the home of his wife-to-be with a roll under each arm and munching a third, and his wife-to-be did see him and note that he made "a most awkward, ridiculous appearance."

Andrew Bradford had nothing to offer—the vacancy left by the death of Aquila Rose had already been filled. But Franklin was not yet done with the ghostly trail of Aquila. At Andrew Bradford's suggestion he waited on Samuel Keimer, who had recently set up as a printer despite a meager endowment of equipment, native ability, or acquired skill. He found Keimer "composing an Elegy on Aquila Rose" directly from the type.

So there being no copy (recorded Franklin), but one pair of cases, and the Elegy likely to require all the letters, no one could help him. I endeavor'd to put his press (which he had not yet us'd, and of which he understood nothing) into order fit to be work'd with; and, promising to come and print off his Elegy as soon as he should have got it ready, I return'd to Bradford's, who gave me a little job to do for the present, and there I lodged and dieted. A few days after, Keimer sent for me to print off the Elegy. And now he had got another pair of cases, and a pamphlet to reprint, on which he set me to work.

This broadside poem, therefore, was the first piece of Philadelphia printing with which Franklin's name is clearly identified. The "pamphlet to reprint" may have been A Letter to a Friend in Ireland, The Doctrine of Absolute Reprobation Refuted, A Letter from One in the Country to His Friend in the City, A Parable, or (and this would certainly have been Franklin's choice) The Curiosities of Common Water, all of which Keimer imprints of 1723 are listed in the short-title check list which follows the Curtis catalogue. No more specifically is it possible to identify the "little job" which Andrew Bradford gave him.

It is not likely that Franklin would have long continued with Keimer (who was "an odd fish; ignorant of common life, fond of rudely opposing receiv'd opinions, slovenly to extream dirtiness, enthusiastic in some points of religion, and a little knavish withal") even if a roundabout coincidence had not brought him to the attention o£ the governor of the province, Sir William Keith, whose quarrel with William Bradford had been one of the impulses that had established the latter as New York's first printer. Keimer "star'd like a pig poison'd" one day when no less a worthy than Sir William entered the shop in search of the new assistant from Boston. Governor and assistant adjourned to a tavern, where the former disclosed a grandiose idea for setting the newcomer up in a shop of his own. He must first, of course, go to London to buy equipment, and to this end the governor loaded him down with enthusiasm and letters of credit. After a short visit to Boston, where all "made me welcome, except my brother," who "receiv'd me not very frankly, look'd me all over, and turn'd to his work again", Franklin sailed for London, which he reached the day before Christmas, 1724—to learn, to his intense mortification, that Sir William's letters of credit were worthless, since that gentleman's prowess as a promiser and his shortcomings as a performer were rather more familiar in the old country than in the new.

Franklin, however, had little difficulty in extricating himself from the crisis into which he was precipitated on his arrival in London by the non-negotiability of Sir William Keith's commercial paper. "I immediately got into work at Palmer's," he says, "then a famous printing house in Bartholomew Close, and here I continu'd near a year." Samuel Palmer, declares John Clyde Oswald in Benjamin Franklin, Printer (New York, 1917), "was more than an ordinary printer. He had visited America, was letter-founder as well as printer, and was engaged in the writing of 'A History of Printing,' only a third of which he had completed when he died in 1732."

Franklin identifies only one of the jobs on which he worked at Palmer's. "I was employed," continues the Autobiography, "in composing for the second edition of Wollaston's Religion of Nature." The name of William Wollaston (1659-1724) now survives mainly by virtue of this adventitious association with a nineteen-year-old immigrant compositor. The Religion of Nature Delineated first appeared in 1722 in a small privately printed edition. Presumably this first edition is now rare, but no collector is impressed thereby, preferring above it that on which Franklin worked (the third in strict sequence, but the second published edition), which, happily, is relatively common. It bears the imprint: "London: Printed by S. Palmer, and sold by B. Lintott, W. and J. Innys, J. Osborn, J. Batley, and T. Longman. 1725." The printer from America pondered over the copy as he set it, and out of his ruminations came a pamphlet reply to the recently deceased author: A Dissertation on Liberty And Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (London, 1725). Franklin printed one hundred copies, gave a few to friends, and then, repenting of his materialistic agnosticism, "burnt the rest except one copy"; pride of authorship would not wholly down. That copy may be one of the four known to survive today, all in institutional collections.

Receiving a better offer from John Watts, who conducted a larger printing establishment, Franklin went thither, remaining six months, when he accepted the proposal of a Philadelphia merchant then in London that he return and act "as his clerk, keep his books, in which he would instruct me, copy his letters, and attend the store." In leaving London, therefore, Franklin supposed that he thereby "took leave of printing forever."

Man proposes. Franklin and his new employer reached Philadelphia; the store was duly opened and its new clerk installed; four months later the employer died. The establishment was taken over by the executors and Franklin was out of work. Keimer wanted him back as foreman of his new and larger shop, but Franklin, who knew well his Keimer, first sought a place at his new trade of clerk and salesman. Nothing offered, so he reluctantly accepted Keimer's bid. The affiliation did not last long. Franklin and Keimer quarreled over "a trifle" that represented the culmination of a long series of abuses:

A great noise happening near the courthouse, I put my head out of the window to see what was the matter. Keimer, being in the street, look'd up and saw me, call'd out to me in a loud voice and angry tone to mind my business, adding some reproachful words, that nettled me the more for their publicity, all the neighbors who were looking out on the same occasion, being witness how I was treated. He came up immediately into the printing-house, continu'd the quarrel, high words pass'd on both sides, he gave me the quarter's warning we had stipulated, expressing a wish that he had not been oblig'd to so long a warning. I told him that his wish was unnecessary, for I would leave him that instant; and so, taking my hat, walk'd out of doors.

Had affairs not fallen out thus ludicrously, then some other incident would have "snapt our connections." If no "great noise" had occurred near the courthouse (what, one wonders, was the cause of the disturbance?), there would still have been a subsequent great noise in Keimer's shop, and the hireling would have spoken his piece to the overlord and walked out of the identical door to the fulfillment of his high destiny.

Franklin was of more than half a mind to return to Boston, in which event Philadelphia would one day have been compelled to seek another patron saint. Fortunately for Philadelphia, while working at Keimer's, Franklin had struck up a friendship with Hugh Meredith, a fellow craftsman, who suggested a partnership. A secret agreement was drawn up, and pending the completion of arrangements for launching the venture, Franklin sought temporary work at Bradford's. Keimer meanwhile was negotiating with the provincial government of New Jersey for the printing of an issue of paper money at Burlington, and urged Franklin to accompany him if he was awarded the job. The plan went through, and the pair were in Burlington three months. "There is not a single piece of this paper money known to exist today," says Dr. Campbell, "and of the New Jersey Laws that they printed at the same time there are only two known copies...."

In the summer of 1728 the new firm of B. Franklin and H. Meredith came into existence. They had scarce "opened our letters" (their cases, that is, not the morning mail) when a friend "brought a countryman to us, whom he had met in the street inquiring for a printer." The identity of this bucolic, casual, but superlatively important patron of the typographic arts is unknown and probably forever unknowable, for he could hardly have been aware that he was the instrument of Providence chosen to motivate the first imprint issued by Franklin as a master printer. Dr. Campbell surmised the job was "probably stationery or a small handbill." Whatever it was, it has probably vanished beyond hope of recall, or at least beyond hope of positive identification.

Almost on the heels of this first customer came another—none other than Samuel Keimer, whose general ineffectualness and chronic state of panic provide much of the comic relief in the history of early American printing. Keimer had been working off and on for three years on William Sewell's History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers: The Third Edition, Corrected. The end was not in sight, and Keimer, evidently in a condition of acute mental distress, rushed to the new shop for assistance. Franklin and Meredith composed and printed "forty sheets," totaling nearly a third of the seven hundred pages—the first known job to issue from their shop, even though it did not bear their imprint. Sewell's History is doubly a Franklin item, as Franklin must have worked on the book while he was still in Keimer's employ.

Thanks to the diligence of its proprietors—or of one of them, for Meredith "was often seen drunk in the streets, and playing at low games in alehouses"—the new shop prospered. But about the middle of 1730 it encountered a hazard which its sponsors had not foreseen. Meredith's father had advanced one hundred pounds to put the enterprise on its feet and had promised another hundred. When the time came for him to meet his obligation, he could not, and "the New Printing-Office near the Market" was faced with a creditor's suit. This crisis confirmed young Meredith's conviction that he was not cut out for the printing business; moreover, he was anxious to join a company of fellow Welshmen who were planning a settlement in North Carolina. Two of Franklin's friends offered to come to the aid of the senior partner, and the difficulty was amicably adjusted. Thus was the "B. Franklin" imprint born. It appeared for the first time not on anything in English, but at the bottom of the title-page of Mystische und Sehr Geheyme Sprueche, by Conrad Beissel, whose religio-communistic Ephrata colony, itself to become one day an important printing center, had been organized only a few years before.

Shortly before the dissolution of the firm of Franklin and Meredith there had been another odd run-in with Keimer. Franklin was already planning a newspaper, and "foolishly" imparted the secret to a friend who forthwith made it known to Keimer. Toward the end of 1728 the not-to-be-anticipated Keimer issued the first number of The Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette. It was Keimer's inescapable genius to start what he could not finish, and he was soon glad to dispose of the paper to Franklin and Meredith, whose control dates from October 2, 1729. One of Franklin's first acts as a newspaper publisher—his memory must have harked back to the old Boston days—was to shorten the too comprehensive title to The Pennsylvania Gazette.

Probably some three months after the departure of Meredith, Franklin initiated a new partnership. He married. "Partnership" is no romantic figure of speech. The name of Deborah Read has an honored place on the roster of women who helped to make American printing. By her husband's own testimony, her share in the work of the establishment included, in some measure, the "folding and stitching" of pamphlets, and it is not unlikely that her hands had a busy share in the preparation of some of the series of pamphlets with which, more than with any other, Franklin's name is most clearly associated as author-printer-publisher—the Poor Richard almanacs.

The importance of the almanac in the colonial scheme has already been stressed. Franklin was naturally alert to this importance; in fact, as soon as the house of Franklin and Meredith was in existence he had commissioned Thomas Godfrey to compile an almanac. Godfrey was "a self-taught mathematician, great in his way," but "he knew little out of his way," and there was considerable of the prima donna in his make-up. He prepared almanacs for 1730, 1731, and 1732, and then, in an outburst of temperament, transferred his skill to the shelter of Andrew Bradford. The fortunate result, certainly not anticipated by Thomas Godfrey in his dudgeon, was, as Paul Leicester Ford defines it, the birth of American humor. Franklin initiated the Poor Richard series, compiling the bulk of the contents himself, but attributing their authorship to Richard Saunder or Saunders, whose almanacs had enjoyed enormous popularity in England and were still enjoying it, though Saunders had been gone this many a year. A Poor Robin series of almanacs was also popular in England, and James Franklin a few years earlier had begun a series of Rhode Island almanacs under this title. Poor Richard was an immediate success, and though the first number was not advertised in The Pennsylvania Gazette until December 19, 1732, which was rather late in the year for a new almanac, three printings were necessary to supply the demand. Poor Richard thereafter issued regularly every December under Franklin's own editorship until 1757 (for 1758).

Poor Richard's rich wisdom has become part of common speech wherever English or any other language is spoken. Everyone from China to Peru knows that God helps those that help themselves, that three removes are as bad as a fire, that

A recent commentator—Carl L. Becker in the Dictionary of American Biography—says of the Poor Richard almanacs:

Nothing better exhibits the man, or better illustrates his ingenuity as an advertiser.... "Richard Saunders," the Philomath of the Almanack, was the Sir Roger de Coverley of the masses, pilfering the world's store of aphorisms, and adapting them to the circumstances and the understanding of the poor. "Necessity never made a good bargain." "It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright." "Many dishes make diseases." "The used key is always bright." The Almanack was immediately successful and commonly sold about ten thousand copies. "As Poor Richard says" became a current phrase, used to give weight to any counsel of thrift. The work made Franklin's name a household word throughout the colonies.... The introduction to the last Almanack (Father Abraham's speech at the auction) spread the fame of Poor Richard in Europe. It was printed in broadsides and posted on walls in England, and, in translation, distributed by the French clergy among their parishioners. It has been translated into fifteen languages, and reprinted at least four hundred times.

Franklin's rise to the position of the most important printer in the colonies after the well-entrenched Bradfords was now rapid. Before long he was official printer to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. Of the bulk of his non-governmental productions, Ford writes that while generally "of little moment," still "there can be no doubt that as a whole they contain more of genuine merit than those of any other printer of the same or previous periods in the colonies, the amount of doctrinal and polemical theology being a minimum, and bearing a less proportion to the whole mass than can be found in the books of contemporary American printers." In 1735 appeared over Franklin's imprint James Logan's Cato's Moral Distichs Englished in Couplets. Nine years later Franklin sponsored Samuel Richardson's Pamela—not only the first American edition, but the first novel to be printed in America, "Price 6 s." In the same year, 1744, he issued what is generally regarded as the typographical masterpiece of his press, M. T. Cicero's Cato Major, or His Discourse of Old-Age: With Explanatory Notes (also Englished by James Logan), referring to it in a four-page foreword of his own composition as "this first Translation of a Classic in this Western World." This was a wide error, for George Sandys had translated Ovid on the banks of the James River a life-span earlier, and the translation had been printed in London in 1626; moreover, Franklin forgot those Moral Distichs of Cato and James Logan which he himself had issued in 1735.

In 1748, Franklin formed a partnership with an alert young Scotchman whom he had engaged five years before, and the "Franklin and Hall" imprint thereupon replaced (with a few exceptions) the familiar "B. Franklin." A few earlier connections must be mentioned. Franklin's name is found on several German titles in combination with that of Gotthard Armbruester and with that of Johannes Böhm, and, apparently once only, with that of Johannes Wüster, but these seem to have been purely partnerships of convenience, and suggest no such dual affiliations as those with Meredith and Hall. The Hall partnership lasted eighteen years, and during that period Franklin's connection with printing and publishing became less and less important as the crisis in international affairs that was bringing on the American Revolution grew more and more acute. But the printer in him could not wholly be suppressed. When he went to Paris in 1776 as representative of the colonies, he established a little press for his own amusement at his home in Passy, then a suburb, now as much a part of the metropolis as Greenwich Village is of New York. It was not quite such a toy as Robert Louis Stevenson and his stepson Lloyd Osbourne were one day to set up in Switzerland, the main difference being that the Stevenson-Osbourne combination knew nothing about printing and was joyously aware of it, whereas Franklin, with just as joyous awareness, knew as much about it as any man of his time. One factor the two private presses of Passy and Davos-Platz have in common—their productions are excessively rare and costly collector's playthings. The story of the French venture is authoritatively set forth in Luther S. Livingston's Franklin and His Press at Passy, issued by the Grolier Club of New York in 1914. Livingston listed thirty-two entries, and since his monograph was published six others have come to light, according to Will Ransom's Private Presses and Their Books (New York, 1929).

The output of Franklin's press from 1729 to the termination of the Hall partnership (1766) is statistically impressive. The following summary is tabulated from the short-title check list of all Franklin imprints known in 1918 which Dr. Campbell appended to the Curtis catalogue (excluding The Pennsylvania Gazette and the numerous issues of paper currency printed by Franklin from 1731 to 1764):

1729 8 1748 30

1730 15 1749 33

1731 8 1750 19

1732 15 1751 24

1733 14 1752 18

1734 15 1753 16

1735 20 1754 15

1736 8 1755 27

1737 13 1756 26

1738 9 1757 31

1739 12 1758 13

1740 46 1759 16

1741 45 1760 10

1742 31 1761 12

1743 25 1762 8

1744 25 1763 15

1745 15 1764 18

1746 23 1765 19

1747 27 1766 4

Any book, pamphlet, broadside, or periodical that bears a Franklin imprint, alone or in combination, is worth treasuring on that account alone. In general, the scale of desirability is set by scarcity, this scale one might suppose, should follow the line of chronology with reasonable accuracy, but it happens that it does not. The Sewell History, for instance, ought by chronological measurement to be an excessively rare book as the first book on which Franklin worked as an independent printer, and rare it assuredly is, but by no means to the point of utter elusiveness.

Twelve years later the total of Franklin imprints was moving toward two hundred—and in that twelfth year, 1740, there issued from his press the second edition of David Evan's A Short, Plain Help for Parents and Heads of Families, to Feed Their Babes with the Sincere Milk of God's Word. Being a Short, Plain Catechism, Grounded Upon God's Word, and Agreeable to the Westminster Assembly's Excellent Catechism. No copy of the first edition is known to be extant—Dr. Campbell quoted the title imperfectly from a contemporary advertisement—and neither Hildeburn nor Campbell knew that a second edition had ever been issued. Neither did anyone else until 1929, when a copy came to light and won its way to a New York book-seller's catalogue. The book is mentioned here, not because it possesses great intrinsic importance (it would be of trivial note if a hundred or two copies of it survived), but as an indication of the fact that unrecorded Franklin imprints are likely to appear at any time, and as indication, further, that the scarcity of Franklin imprints does not altogether parallel the dates of his activity as printer and publisher.

In these notes it has been necessary to neglect Franklin, the author (save as Poor Richard), in favor of Franklin, the printer and publisher. But it would be an effrontery to allude even briefly to Franklin without mention of the Autobiography. Begun in 1771 in the quiet charm of an English country-seat, the first great American classic never was completed. The manuscript first appeared in print, by an odd series of accidents, in French in 1791. Subsequently Franklin's grandson, William Temple Franklin, issued it in a Bowdlerized English version that would have afforded the old man quiet and somewhat indignant laughter. The text was not definitely published until 1868, soon after John Bigelow had come into possession of the original manuscript.

Franklin's epitaph is easily the most familiar in American history, and almost as well-known a document, perhaps, as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. It is not generally known, however, that the original version of it was composed in 1728, the very year in which its author, a youth of twenty-two, entered into partnership with Meredith. The version written in that year, which differs in minor details from the final draft, was this:

THE BODY OF B FRANKLIN PRINTER, (LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK ITS CONTENTS TORN OUT AND STRIPT OF ITS LETTERING & GILDING) LIES HERE, FOOD FOR WORMS. BUT THE WORK SHALL NOT BE LOST; FOR IT WILL, (AS HE BELIEV'D) APPEAR ONCE MORE, IN A NEW AND MORE ELEGANT EDITION REVISED AND CORRECTED, BY THE AUTHOR.

Note: A documented account of the various transcripts of Franklin's celebrated epitaph appeared in The New Colophon, Volume 3, New York, 1950. It discusses the date of its composition, place of first publication and the differing texts, and was written by Lyman H. Butterfield, associate editor of the Jefferson papers.

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