A printing-house in the 1730s was a shop of three or four men, one wooden press, a few hundred pounds of type imported from London, and a stock of paper that had to be bought before anything could be printed on it. It made its living not from books but from blanks: bonds, indentures, land warrants, summonses, bills of lading, the forms on which a colony runs. The printers called this job printing. It was dull, it was constant, and it paid for everything else.
A colonial press lived on three kinds of customer: the government, which paid for laws and forms; the religious societies, which paid for tracts and paid promptly; and the private client with a bond to sign or a book to publish. Between 1735 and 1748 Franklin's shop served all three, and served them well enough that at forty-two he could hand the daily work to a partner and walk away rich. The paper of those years is the ordinary paper of a province, rare now, in most cases, precisely because it was ordinary then.
Benjamin Franklin came to the trade young. He was born in Boston in 1706 and apprenticed at twelve to his older brother James, who printed the New-England Courant, one of the first independent newspapers in the colonies. He ran away at seventeen and reached Philadelphia in 1723 with almost nothing, worked for a printer named Samuel Keimer, spent eighteen months in London learning the trade properly, and opened his own shop in 1728. From it came the Pennsylvania Gazette, a weekly newspaper he bought from Keimer in 1729 and made the best in America; Poor Richard, an almanac he wrote and printed every year from 1733; the laws of the Pennsylvania Assembly when the Assembly paid him to print them; and blanks, every other day of the week.
What Franklin chose to print for himself, rather than for a customer, tells you what he valued. In 1744 he issued the first classical text published in the colonies for its own sake, James Logan's translation of Cicero on old age, and set it with a care he gave to nothing else. A year later he printed the first medical treatise written and published in America. Both were, in the commercial sense, failures. Both were the point.
The Great Awakening reached Philadelphia in November 1739 in the person of George Whitefield, and Franklin, who admired the preacher, doubted the doctrine, and could estimate a crowd to the thousand, became his printer. He ran Whitefield's letters in the Gazette and reprinted them as pamphlets. When the critics complained that no Philadelphia printer would print anything against the evangelist, Franklin printed the critics. The press was neutral, and neutrality paid.
He was not alone in the trade. Andrew Bradford had been printing in Philadelphia since 1712 and published the American Weekly Mercury, the city's first newspaper, from the Sign of the Bible in Front Street. He was also the postmaster, which mattered a great deal, because the post carried the newspapers and a printer who controlled it could keep a rival's paper off the roads. Franklin took the postmastership from him in 1737 and the two fought for the same customers until Bradford died.
As with Franklin learning the trade from his brother, Philadelphia printing was a family business. After Bradford died in 1742 his widow Cornelia carried the Mercury on for four years, at first in partnership with his former apprentice Isaiah Warner, and his nephew William Bradford III opened a rival paper, the Pennsylvania Journal, in Second Street and stayed Franklin's competitor for the next twenty years. In Germantown, five miles up the road, Christopher Saur printed in German for the largest German-speaking population in the colonies, and his son printed after him. Franklin answered with a succession of German partners, Crellius, Bohm and Armbruster, and never caught him.
None of it could happen without supplies. The paper came from mills on the Wissahickon Creek and from Thomas Willcox at Ivy Mills in Chester County. The type came from William Caslon in London, ordered through Franklin's friend and agent William Strahan, because no type was cast in America until the 1770s. The ink Franklin made himself from lampblack and varnish, and sold to other printers. This room follows all of it, from a book printed in Keimer's shop while Franklin was working there to the last sheets carrying his name in January 1766.
No press stood alone. Franklin's shop had rivals it displaced, partners it financed, and heirs it trained. The press he sent to Antigua came home to Burlington, where James Parker used it in 1765 to print the first history of New Jersey, sold in Philadelphia by David Hall: the Franklin network, complete in one imprint. Benjamin Mecom, the son of Franklin's sister Jane, failed on four presses his uncle set up for him. He had Franklin's blood and none of his luck. In Newport, Rhode Island, the press James Franklin carried from Boston passed to his widow Ann, and then to their son.
