|
This wonderful book is an extraordinary rarity among
early American imprints. It is the first job
undertaken by Benjamin Franklin as proprietor of his own
print shop in Philadelphia. Franklin's hard work
printing the book, immortalized in his own account of
the printing in his autobiography, is what built his
reputation and launched his business.
At just 22 years old,
young Benjamin Franklin parted ways with Samuel Keimer,
his first boss in the printing trade in Philadelphia, to
start his own printing business. Franklin and
Keimer had a stormy relationship, with the younger
Franklin always confident that he could do a better job
than the older Keimer. Their story is the
quintessential American entrepreneur story, and this
book bore witness to that episode. Keimer was
commissioned by the Quakers to print the work beginning
in 1725, but by 1728 he had not yet finished. The
book, The History of the Rise, Increase, and
Progress, of the Christian People Called Quakers,
written by William Sewel, was first published in the
Dutch language in Amsterdam in 1717, with a second
edition published in English in London in 1722. In
1725, the Quakers desired an American edition and they
approached Samuel Keimer to do the job. Franklin
likely worked on the book occasionally while he was employed as Keimer's foreman, but in 1728 Franklin and associate
Hugh Meredith, who also worked in Keimer's shop,
established their own print shop with a press and
type sets that Franklin procured from London. Although
Franklin's name is not on the title-page, Franklin and
Meredith actually printed 44 folio sheets, which were
divided into 176 individual pages of the book, beginning
with the Tenth Book on page 533. The book had a total of
710 pages, in large folio format; only the second book
of this size to be printed in the colonies up to that
time.
Franklin himself writes in his own autobiography
specifically about the job of printing this book.
He first describes The Junto, the club that Franklin
organized among friends for discussing important matters
of the day. After briefly introducing the members
of the club, he mentions how they were helpful in
getting him started in his printing business.
Joseph Breintnal, one of Franklin's friends, helped
arrange this first job.
|
"Breintnal particularly procur'd us from the
Quakers the printing forty sheets of their
history, the rest being to be done by Keimer;
and upon this we work'd exceedingly hard,
for the price was low. It was a folio, pro
patria size, in pica, with long primer
notes. I compos'd of it a sheet a day, and
Meredith worked it off at press; it was
often eleven at night, and sometimes later,
before I had finished my distribution for
the next day's work, for the little jobbs
sent in by our other friends now and then
put us back. But so determin'd I was to
continue doing a sheet a day of the folio,
that one night, when, having impos'd my
forms, I thought my day's work over, one of
them by accident was broken, and two pages
reduced to pi, I immediately distributed and
compos'd it over again before I went to bed;
and this industry, visible to our neighbors,
began to give us character and credit;
particularly, I was told, that mention being
made of the new printing-office at the
merchants' Every-night club, the general
opinion was that it must fail, there being
already two printers in the place, Keimer
and Bradford; but Dr. Baird (whom you and I
saw many years after at his native place,
St. Andrew's in Scotland) gave a contrary
opinion: "For the industry of that
Franklin," says he, "is superior to any
thing I ever saw of the kind; I see him
still at work when I go home from club, and
he is at work again before his neighbors are
out of bed."
- Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography |
This is the book,
and these are the pages, that Benjamin
Franklin was working on during those long
days and late nights. It is also
interesting to compare the composition and
inking of the types of the book,
before page 533, printed by Keimer, to Benjamin Franklin's compositing
and printing. Franklin's skill level far exceeded Keimer's; and Franklin was using new types that he
had just received from London, while Keimer's types
are old and worn. Pages 533 to the end are the work
of a young Franklin who is already a master of his
craft. The book is printed on American and foreign
paper. These pages have some of the earliest
American paper watermarks from the earliest American
paper mills. The main printer in Philadelphia,
Andrew Bradford, prevented Franklin from procuring
paper from the well-established Rittenhouse Paper
Mill, so Franklin was left to his own resources to
try and find suitable paper for the work. The newly
established Gorgas Paper Mill just outside of
Philadelphia was an early source for Franklin's
paper. This book has watermarks from that mill.
The pages are clean and without tears, overall in
very good condition. The book is missing the
dedication page, two other leaves in the text, and
the last three index leaves printed by Franklin.
(The copy held by the American Antiquarian Society
is missing five leaves and the copy held by the
Library of Congress is missing one leaf of the
index.) There has been professional archival repairs
to the fore-edge margins of the first four leaves.
The book has been skillfully rebound in the original
style of William Davies, the original binder of this
work. It is bound in the identical full-calf,
exactly duplicating the original English panel style
decoration, down to the corner fleurons that were
made especially for this restoration. There
were a total of only 500 of these books printed, and
likely that very few copies have
survived. Most examples are institutional collections.
In C. William Miller's
Benjamin Franklin's Philadelphia Printing,
1728 to 1766, a comprehensive survey of imprints
produced by Benjamin Franklin during his career as a
printer, this
publication is the first, with a survey number of
Miller 1. |
|
The first page of the section printed by
Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith. |
|
|
|
