Benjamin Franklin, Man of Letters

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.

Franklin saw an opening and donned his mask. Two masks, in fact: Martha Careful and Caelia Shortface. The “ladies” were outraged to see an article on such a private topic in a family newspaper. Writing in the American Weekly Mercury, a rival newspaper, they warned Keimer that “if thou proceed any further in that scandalous manner, we intend very soon to have thy right ear for it.” Franklin-in-drag concluded his letter with some advice: “If thou [can] make no better use of thy dictionary, sell it … and if thou hath nothing else to put in thy Gazette, lay it down.”

That is what happened. Keimer sold his newspaper to Franklin for a pittance. Ben renamed it the Pennsylvania Gazette. The first edition under new management was published on Christmas Eve 1728. It no longer featured excerpts from the drab encyclopedia but, instead, passages from Xenophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates and The Morals of Confucius, among other imaginative sources. Franklin added more local and colonial news and published more frequently. The new Pennsylvania Gazette was livelier, timelier, and, of course, funnier than Keimer’s. It was, like Franklin himself, at once highbrow and lowbrow.

Franklin crowdsourced the Gazette. He solicited help from readers well-versed in geography, history, and international customs. “Men thus accomplish’d are very rare in this remote part of the world; and it would be well if the writer of these papers could make up among his friends what is wanting in himself.” Classic Franklin. Never hesitate to tap into collective wisdom. Soon, he would establish a network of printers from Boston to Antigua — an early internet.

Ben was a discerning editor. He valued writing that was “smooth, clear, and short.” Some confused this simplicity of expression with shallow thinking. If a simple Pennsylvania farmer could understand these ideas, how profound could they be? But Franklin, like Einstein, believed the ability to express complex ideas simply was the true mark of genius. Baroque prose risks offending “the ear, the understanding, or the patience,” whereas simplicity represents “the highest happiness.”

Good writing must be, above all else, useful. It must, he said, “benefit the reader, either by improving his virtue or his knowledge.” Today, such useful books are relegated to the self-help sections of bookstores where they are taken less seriously than “literary” works, though they do sell well. Franklin would be confused by this disparity. What is more serious than the truly useful?

A half-century before the First Amendment, Franklin championed freedom of the press. In response to charges that he was publishing scandalous material, he wrote a spirited defense of printers everywhere: “The opinions of men are almost as various as their faces,” he said. If printers vowed not to print anything that offended someone, “there would be very little printed.”

I am at the Library Company of Philadelphia, America’s first lending library. Of all the institutions Franklin founded, this was his favorite: “The Mother of all the [North] American Subscription Libraries,” he called it. It is here where he taught himself several languages. Before long, he was reading Machiavelli in Italian and Cervantes in Spanish.

Today, the library building is new and boring, but the books are old and fascinating. One in particular catches my eye, a 1744 edition of Cato Major, Cicero’s meditation on old age. “Franklin’s most beautifully printed book,” the sign reads. And it is. Exquisitely bound and printed on large sheets of creamy white Genoese paper, it is an object of art. I want to touch it but can’t. It is encased in glass.

Franklin published the book partly as a business venture but mostly as a gift to his friend and mentor James Logan. Logan’s eyesight was failing, so Franklin printed the book, which Logan had translated, in large type and with wide margins. It was an extravagant production, and even Logan tried to dissuade Franklin from going through with it. “I advised him against it as I think he must surely lose by it.”

Ben did lose money, but as a publisher, he knew taking risks was crucial to success. He published Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, among the first English novels. He published military books and dictionaries and guides to courtship and marriage and medical treatises, including one with the catchy title Essays on the West-India Dry-Gripes.

Some of his publishing projects succeeded. Others failed spectacularly. His two German-language newspapers folded after only a few editions, as did his general interest magazine. Other projects didn’t even get that far. He wanted to write a book called The Art of Virtue but never did, nor did he launch a support group called the Society of the Free and Easy, which is a shame because, well, sign me up.

The truth is Franklin failed often. He never folded, though. When confronted with a setback, he didn’t abandon the idea. He retooled it and tried again. Franklin never let failure discourage him from taking new risks, including his biggest gamble of all: jumping from British Loyalist to American rebel, and at age 69. For Franklin, failure was a down payment on success.

Three years after revamping the Gazette, Franklin launched his most famous, and profitable, publication, Poor Richard’s Almanack. The man behind this new almanac, Franklin would have us believe, was a humble, cash-strapped, hard-of-hearing astrologer named Richard Saunders. It was great parody, but would it sell? Ben and Richard were up against a tough crowd. The dominant group in Pennsylvania, the Quakers, were known for many things. Humor was not one of them.

The first edition of the annual Poor Richard’s Almanack took aim at the competition. Titan Leeds, a Quaker from Philadelphia, published the bland and predictable American Almanack. Poor Richard (aka Franklin) brazenly predicted Leeds’s imminent demise, and with great specificity. Leeds would die on October 17, 1733, at precisely 3:29 p.m. at the very instant of the conjunction of the sun and Mercury. There was no denying this. It was written in the stars.

As you can imagine, Titan Leeds was not happy to hear this news. Very much alive and writing in his own 1734 almanac, Leeds had some choice words for Poor Richard (and, by extension, Franklin), calling him “a fool and a liar.” Ben was ready with a parry. Surely this outburst proved Leeds was indeed dead and an impostor was now publishing in his name. The real Titan Leeds would never treat anyone “so indecently and so scurrilously.” Titan Leeds never recovered from the dustup. His almanac soon folded.

A few years later, in 1738, Titan Leeds died. Franklin had predicted correctly. He was just off by a few years.

Leeds’s demise left the field wide open for Poor Richard, the simple yet wise astrologer mistreated by both his overbearing wife, Bridget, who had expensive taste, and his printer, B. Franklin, who “runs away with the greatest part of the profit.” It was all great fun and wildly successful. Poor Richard became the bestselling almanac in the colonies. The first 1,000 copies sold out in two days. In most Pennsylvania homes, you would find two, and only two, books: the Bible and Poor Richard’s Almanack.

Franklin’s almanac, like others at the time, contained crop forecasts, high and low tides, the times of sunrise and sunset, court dates, distances between towns, recipes, astrological predictions, instructions for making herbal remedies, and other bits of useful information. Franklin also peppered the pages with “the wisdom of many ages and nations,” pithy proverbs, some original, most borrowed and revised. What others said, Franklin said better — and funnier. He converted an Italian proverb, “The man who lives by hope will die by hunger,” into “He that lives upon hope, dies farting.” He took a 16th-century saying, “Fish and guests in three days are stale,” and rendered it as “Fish and visitors stink in three days.” It is Franklin’s version we remember today.

Poor Richard is forever pleading with his readers to cut him some slack. Sure, he sometimes makes mistakes, but he always gets the day of the month right. As for his wayward weather predictions, he requested “the favourable allowance of a day or two before and a day or two after the precise day against which the weather is set.” He begged forgiveness for failing to include eclipses of the moon one year, but “the truth is, I do not find they do you any good.”

Franklin’s almanac was amusing, but it was more than that. It was useful, “a proper vehicle for conveying instruction among the common people, who bought scarce any other books,” he said. Franklin knew people hate to take advice, even good advice, and “would never read beyond the first line of my lectures, if they were usually fill’d with nothing but wholesome precepts and advice.” So he peppered his proverbs — “scraps from the table of wisdom” he called them — with whimsy. Franklin’s follies lured readers inside the circus tent, where they “will perhaps meet with a serious reflection … [and] may ever after be the better for.” The Old Conjurer at it again, tricking people into becoming better versions of themselves.

Ironically, it was the character named Poor Richard who made Ben Franklin’s rich and varied life possible. The success of his almanac, along with his newspaper and print shop, enabled him to retire from business at age 42 and turn his attention to “philosophical amusements.”

Eric Weiner is author of The Geography of Bliss and The Geography of Genius, among others. A former international correspondent for NPR, his work has appeared in The Atlantic, National Geographic, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the anthology Best American Travel Writing. For more information, visit EricWeinerBooks.com.

This article is featured in the November/December 2024 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.