Paper Trail

Printing and writing are such distinct trades today that the idea of a printer-writer can be both confounding and fascinating. Walt Whitman and Henry George were titanic figures in American letters who came to writing via the artisan’s trade of printing. Their Colonial forebear, as a new exhibition at the Grolier Club makes clear, was Benjamin Franklin. “Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer” beautifully illustrates how those two roles in Franklin’s life are impossible to separate from each other.Most of the exhibition covers Franklin’s career as a printer. This began in 1718, when he was indentured, at the age of 12, to his brother James, who operated a printing press in Boston. It ends in 1748, when Franklin retired from printing to concentrate on his myriad other interests. In 1721, James Franklin formed a newspaper, the New England Courant, for which Benjamin did everything from set the type to deliver the papers. Not least did the 15-year-old write for the Courant, though he did so pseudonymously, under the name “Silence Dogood.” The reason for the anonymity was to conceal his identity from his brother, who, Franklin felt, would not have printed anything submitted by his little brother and apprentice. The Dogood essays were satirical works spoofing aspects of New England Puritan culture, and were probably the first works of their kind to be printed in America.From the beginnings of his career, Franklin’s roles as printer and writer were closely intertwined. And in both capacities, he may be credited with countless firsts, as much as would later be the case with his brilliant forays into science, diplomacy, and other fields. Franklin fell out with his brother, and in 1723 decided to seek work elsewhere as a printer. In this period, the Colonies possessed precious few presses. New York had one, that of William Bradford, who turned down Franklin’s application for work. (Bradford later hired John Peter Zenger, who in his celebrated trial for slander in 1735 was defended by Franklin’s great friend, the Philadelphia lawyer Andrew Hamilton.) From New York, Franklin moved on to Philadelphia, where he found work with the printer Samuel Keimer.The Grolier exhibition originated at the Library Company of Philadelphia in 2006, marking that august institution’s 275th anniversary. It was America’s first subscription library, and Franklin served it at various times as president, librarian, and secretary, and, in 1741, printed its first catalog.The Grolier presents the show in 10 display cases, the first of which is entitled “The Printer as Writer.” The second, “The Printer as Entrepreneur,” shows how aggressively Franklin came to dominate the printing business in Philadelphia, then later in the Colonies. The hundreds of items on display mainly comprise printed materials of staggering variety. In the third case, “Job Printing,” and the fourth, “Book Work,” we see the bread-and-butter for-hire jobs that Franklin took on. He printed for the Quakers, and the Freemasons (of which he was one). He printed advertisements, share certificates, and bills of lading. He printed America’s first political cartoon, paper currency for New Jersey designed to be difficult to counterfeit, books of psalms that cashed in on the Great Awakening (1739), and America’s first German-language and bilingual (German-English) newspapers. (Franklin had very little formal schooling, but read avidly and taught himself several European languages, at which he was most fluent in German.)The fifth case, “Benjamin Franklin, Publisher,” exhibits items he published as opposed to printed. One item the Grolier has added to the Library Company’s exhibition is a copy of Franklin’s printing of Samuel Richardson’s “Pamela,” the first novel to be printed in America. The copy shown here is the only known extant copy.Franklin is most famous for publishing the newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette, which, following some rather aggressive business maneuvers, he bought in 1729 from his onetime employer Keimer, and for the almanac Poor Richard, which Franklin began in 1732. From the start it sold 10,000 copies a year — an astonishing number given the population and literacy rates of the time. Though he retired from printing in 1748, he provided material to Poor Richard until 1757. The show impressively features many of the sources from which Franklin derived such material as the almanac’s famous aphorisms, which have long been ascribed to Franklin himself though he never concealed that he borrowed them.A whole case of the Grolier show is dedicated to his preface to the 1757 almanac, which was later reprinted on its own as “The Way to Wealth,” the best-known of Franklin’s writings until his “Autobiography” began to appear after his death. Though the bulk of the show concerns Franklin’s work prior to his 1748 retirement from printing (he lived until 1790), the last two cases, “Making Franklin’s ‘Autobiography’: Paris to London” and “From Memoirs to Autobiography,” go well beyond that date in detailing the complicated history of the work for which Franklin is today best known as a writer. Franklin was as celebrated in Paris, where he lived between 1776 and 1785, as he was in Philadelphia. It was in France — and in French — that the first two (of four) parts of his “Autobiography” first appeared in book form, one year after his death. All four parts did not appear together in book form until 1828, and again it was in French.Some visitors may find it difficult to focus on an exhibition, such as this one, with an emphasis on books and other printed materials. But the story told here is a rich one, made the more so by the density of items displayed. The best way to view this show is after seeing the excellent Lafayette exhibition at the New-York Historical Society. That first full edition of Franklin’s “Autobiography” was printed in France only four years after Lafayette’s triumphant return to America. It is, in large part, through America’s relation to France that our own national identity emerged — and also, in large part, through Franklin’s writing and printing.Until February 2 (47 E. 60th St., between Madison and Park avenues, 212-838-6690).

Paper Trail

Paper Trail

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