About the cover
It seems that Benjamin Franklin printed something in his paper that made certain readers mad. His paper, forerunner of this magazine, was the Pennsylvania Gazette--"Containing the freshest Advices Foreign and Domestick." So editor Franklin defended himself from "the Clamour against me," writing that "if all Printers were determin'd . . . to . . . offend no body, there would be very little printed." Observing that "the Opin¬ions of Men are almost as various as their. Faces" he laid down this philosophy of editing: "When men differ. . . both sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick," for "when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter." . . .

For the central figure in this week's cover' painting Stanley Meltzoff reproduced a Jean Antoine Houdon bust of Benjamin Franklin which is in New York's Metropolitan Museum, and around it he has grouped some Frankliniana which you'll want to know about.

Those squarish spectacles near the bust were worn by Franklin and are now in the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. However, as this marvelously creative man grew older, he felt the need of bifocal glasses; so he just sat down and invented them. These he made round, which is why many early portraits show him wearing round ones.

The cup near the glasses is part of a set of Franklin's porcelainware, also in the Institute; and that plate is a type called Franklin Maxim Plates, popular in the early years of the republic. The plate counsels, "Make hay while the sun shines," a quote from Franklin's famed Poor Richard's Almanack-see copy of it under the cup. As this aphorism is in Cervantes' Don Quixote, maybe the Almanack reprinted it from there, and maybe Cervantes read it in the earlier Proverbes 'collected by John Heywood. This gets us back to 1546, which is far enough.

Franklin once wrote in a letter that the flag of the newly declared republic was going to have red, white and blue stripes with a union of white stars on blue. Some people thus deduce .that he favored and perhaps designed such a flag; so you see a bit of it on the cover.

But Franklin Institute's expert on Frankliniana, Maj. Thomas Coulson, says that there is no real proof of this and he considers the flag letter an unsolved mystery

The inkwell on the cover was used by Franklin and is now in the Pennsylvania Historical Society collection. But the quill isn't. The cover painter, who lives in Fair Haven, New Jersey, says it was donated by a modern Jersey goose.

As you know, Franklin invented a fine stove. It featured a baffle arrangement to consume part of the gases and capture extra heat before the smoke took off up the chimney. He called. it the Pennsylvania Fireplace, but happy users of it immortalized it as the Franklin Stove. Some years later he came up with an improved heater with an urnlike airwarming top which there isn't space to describe technically. Meltzoff has painted a small model of the improved stove from drawings in ancient books of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. And atop the model he has reproduced an old engraving of the first stove, circa 1740.

Above the bust in the painting are old cards once used to incite virtue in school children with examples from the lives of exemplary people. The upper card shows Franklin's lightning rod taking care of some lightning; behind it is a glimpse of young Franklin, on his first day in Philadelphia, eating three-penny rolls; and below you see the young printer industriously printing. And for good measure, Meltzoff has put on the table a ball of twine and a key. With this equipment, plus a kite and a thunderstorm, a brilliant mind could prove that lightning is decidedly electrical, as the founder of this magazine did.