Told  /  Profile

Benjamin Franklin, Man of Letters

The inventor, philosopher, and elder statesman of the American Revolution never gave up on his first love — publishing.

Benjamin Franklin loved words. He loved how they felt in his printer’s composing tray and how they looked on the printed page and how they sounded on the lips of great orators like the preacher George Whitefield. He loved the musicality of words. “Here Skugg lies snug as a bug in a rug,” he wrote to young Georgiana Shipley when her pet squirrel, Mungo, a gift from Ben, met an untimely demise. He invented words, too, mostly electrical terms but also everyday ones like mileage, and fellow-man, and magical circle, and power of attorney.

He also loved the money that words yielded. Franklin, unlike most wealthy people of his time, owed his small fortune not to gold or tobacco or land speculation, but to words.

From a young age, Ben wore the printer title proudly, and continued to do so even after he had achieved international renown, occasionally signing documents simply “B. Franklin, Printer.” He began printing at age 12 and continued well into his 70s when, as U.S. representative to France, he set up a small press at his residence in the village of Passy. There he printed everything from quirky bagatelles to the first U.S. passports to a copy of the peace treaty he helped negotiate with Britain.

For Franklin, printing was more than a profession or business. It was an art, a calling, and a force for good in the world. It was a way of seeing the world, too. Franklin, like all printers, had to compose the type backward and upside down. He grew accustomed to altered perspectives.

The year is 1728. Franklin has just opened his own print shop on Philadelphia’s Market Street. At first, he subsisted on “job printing”: blank forms, legal documents, ledgers. It was dull but lucrative work. Franklin was printing money. Literally. He landed contracts to print the currencies of Pennsylvania, the Three Lower Counties (now Delaware), and New Jersey. He developed innovative ways to thwart counterfeiters by using complex variations of spelling and type, as well as “nature printing,” inserting images of leaves and other foliage that were extremely difficult to mimic.

Life was good but not good enough. Franklin, still in his 20s, was itching to expand into newspapers and book publishing. His bête noire, Samuel Keimer, had launched Pennsylvania’s second newspaper, a dull rag with a name to match: The Universal Instructor in All Arts & Sciences and Pennsylvania Gazette. Keimer was as lazy a publisher as he was a printer. He filled space by reprinting excerpts from a popular encyclopedia, working his way through the alphabet. He didn’t get far. When he reached “Ab,” he published a short article on abortion, as sensitive a topic then as it is now.