Franklin's Press

Foreword

BENJAMIN Franklin was a printer for the whole of his life and a statesman for the last third of it, and he never let anyone forget which came first. He signed himself 'B. Franklin, Printer' in the epitaph he wrote at twenty-two; he set up a private press at Passy at seventy; and when he died the Library Company, the Philosophical Society, and the Hospital he had founded were all institutions his press had printed into being. This catalog follows the printing, in the order it happened.

It begins in Boston, where a twelve-year-old apprentice learned the trade in his brother's shop during the smallpox epidemic of 1721 and set the pamphlets that argued about inoculation. It follows him to London, to Keimer's shop, to the New Printing-Office near the Market, through the partnership with David Hall, and out through the network of rivals, nephews, and partners — Bradford, Mecom, Parker — who ran presses in his orbit. It ends with the printer's own text, The Way to Wealth, in the edition the great Bodoni-trained printers of France thought the prettiest ever made.

The objects are not chosen for beauty, though some are beautiful. They are the ordinary paper of a colonial press: bonds, warrants, session laws, sermons, almanacs, a military commission, a naturalization certificate. Most survive in a handful of copies because nobody thought to keep them. Several survive in one. Read in sequence, they are the account book of a business that made a fortune, a city, and a republic.

He signed himself 'B. Franklin, Printer' at twenty-two, and meant it at eighty-four.