WHEN BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS TWENTY-THREE years old, arrangements were made for him to settle down and find a wife. Living on his own in Philadelphia, young Benny had it all. He owned his own home, a small printing business, and just a few years before, he’d purchased a “genteel new suit,” a fancy watch, and walked around with “near five pounds sterling” in his pockets. But does a home and a business and nice clothes and cash in your pockets mean that you’ve succeeded in Colonial America? It seems to be a pretty good yardstick for success in Philadelphia circa 2017. In 1729, however, Franklin needed a little more.
A wife was a necessity for a printer—not for the usual reasons of companionship, reproduction, and an excuse never to go on awkward first dates again. In eighteenth-century America, the profession of printing was a game of survival, and printers lunged at any economic advantage. One major advantage was a wife who kept the books, folded and quired printed sheets, ran the general store, and even pulled the press or composed lines of type. Franklin needed that kind of a wife.
A tenant of Franklin’s, one Mrs. Godfrey, took it upon herself to find Benjamin a match, and she seems to have succeeded brilliantly. By all accounts, the prospective bride was intelligent, attractive, and capable. You might even say that young Franklin was falling in love. But love doesn’t pay the bills, my friend, and Benjamin—he had bills.
As part of the negotiations, Franklin asked for a one-hundred-pound dowry to pay off his business debts. One hundred pounds was a bit over a year’s salary when he was working as a manager at a previous print shop. So take your annual salary, beef it up with a little overtime, and that’s the bill you hand your in-laws for taking their daughter off their hands. The young woman’s parents came back to Franklin saying “they had no such sum to spare.” Franklin suggested they might “mortgage their house.” After a few days, they countered with “[we do] not approve of the match,” which is the eighteenth-century equivalent of aw, hell no.
At first it might appear that Franklin had overplayed his hand, but in the list of objections to his pursuit of their daughter, the hefty dowry was not among her parents’ grievances. Mrs. Godfrey later explained that, after talking to a local printer named Andrew Bradford, the young woman’s parents were “informed the printing business was not a profitable one.” This Mr. Bradford helped them see that expensive materials such as metal type broke down often in the printing business and had to be replaced from across the Atlantic, in England. Two previous printers in Philadelphia had been forced to close their doors, and Mr. Bradford was sure that Mr. Franklin would “soon follow them.”
After making a few more attempts to meet eligible women and getting nowhere, Franklin had to admit two things: first, “the business of a printer [is] generally thought a poor one,” and second, “I was not to expect money with a wife, unless with such a one as I should not otherwise think agreeable.” This is the Colonial way of saying, Printing is a dead-end job and the only marriage proposal I’m likely to secure is one founded on cooperative desperation.
In the meantime, Franklin nursed his sorrows in the bosoms of paid escorts. “I hurried frequently into intrigues with low women . . . which were attended with some expense,” and a “continual risk to my health . . . though by great good luck I escaped it.” It’s true that no matter how bad life gets you down, everything’s worse with chlamydia.
Benjamin Franklin’s conclusions in 1729 were probably a bit on the pessimistic side. Within a year or so of his failed engagement, he reunited with Deborah Read, a former sweetheart. Deborah was “good and faithful,” but more importantly, she worked hard and efficiently alongside Franklin in his printing endeavors over the next thirty-four years (and at less risk of him contracting chlamydia. From her, anyway).
Though he couldn’t have known it at twenty-three, young Benjamin stood on the precipice of something truly great. Over the next twenty years he would build a printing empire that extended all over the colonies. His actions would help transform the printing press on this continent into a juggernaut of political discourse and social reform. His almanacs would become a foundational symbol of the American experience, and his newspapers a vehicle for fanning the flames of revolution. Also, they would make him a lot of money—like, an ungodly amount of money. The kind of money that lets you retire at age forty-two and spend the next several decades sipping champagne with Parisian debutantes.
The obstacles to Benjamin Franklin’s success were many. To create his empire, he had to follow the money, pinpointing the most lucrative opportunities and devising plans to undermine his competitors. By far the biggest name on his list was Andrew “the In-Law-Whisperer” Bradford. Two men enter Philadelphia. One man leaves alive. (That is a bit dramatic. Both men eventually died in Philadelphia, but “two men enter, one man retires and moves on to a life of public service” didn’t have quite the same ring to it.)
FRANKLIN’S INTRODUCTION to the world of printing began when he was twelve years old. Born to a Boston candle maker, young Benjamin soon found that spending all day cutting wicks and filling molds was not to his liking. Josiah Franklin, shocked that his preteen would rather be swimming at the beach than chandling tallow or boiling soap, pressured the boy into signing a nine-year contract of indentured servitude to his older son, James.
Just the year before, James had returned from England with presses and types and everything a printer needed to start a newspaper. You might think that young Benjamin would be forever grateful to James for rescuing him from the monotony of candles and setting him up as an intern in the exciting and lucrative world of newspapering. In fact, Benjamin hated James when they were working together; he was a servant, not an intern; and apprenticing at a printing house was neither profitable nor remotely pleasant.
Not only were apprentices required to work long hours, six days a week with no pay, but they also had to swear an oath of personal virtue to their masters. This meant no gambling, no drinking, and absolutely no fornicating. Without the holy trinity of things young men do between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, it’s not surprising that the intern pool was somewhat shallow. Given the generally poor reputation surrounding the trade itself, one historian explains, “printers were often ‘obliged to take the lowest people’ for apprentices and journeymen, because no family ‘of substance would ever put their sons to such an art.’”
(Side note: Indentured contracts were printed in pairs, on a single sheet of paper, then cut down the middle to produce two copies. The middle cut was serrated, thereby creating a unique edge of indentations used to verify that the contract of the apprentice matched the contract of his master. Hence, the “indentured” part of indentured servitude. See, history is fun. Not for them, but, you know, for us.)
The life of an indentured servant was not exactly glamorous. Nor did it command much respect. Here is an actual ad placed in a newspaper after one apprentice at the Maryland Gazette went missing: “[He is] very thick, stoops much, and has a down look; he is a little pock-pitted, has a scar on one of his temples, is much addicted to liquor, very talkative when drunk and remarkably stupid.”
Bosses were always having to correct their apprentices. This was not a problem for James Franklin. “Though a brother, [James] considered himself as my master . . . I thought he demeaned me too much . . . [he] was passionate and had often beaten me, which I took extremely amiss.”
Despite his brother’s abuse, young Benjamin felt the pull of the ink and quill. He wanted to write for his brother’s paper, The New-England Courant, but he knew that James and his fellow newspapermen would never take him seriously (to be fair to them, he was only sixteen). To subvert this, Franklin altered his handwriting and took on the guise of a widow pseudonymously named Silence Dogood. Every two weeks or so, Franklin/Dogood would slip an op-ed under the door of his brother’s print shop. Totally unaware of the real author, James and his associates seemed only too delighted to publish Widow Dogood’s letters. “They read it, commented on it in my hearing, and I had the exquisite pleasure, of finding it met with their approbation,” Franklin would recall. Just a spoonful of tricking your boss as an insightful middle-aged woman with three kids makes the workplace beatings go down.
It wasn’t just the printers who were fooled by Silence Dogood. She became well liked enough in Boston that several men reportedly wrote into the paper offering to, let’s say, rectify her widow status. You can’t blame them. Dogood was an insufferable tease. “[Widowhood] is a state I never much admired,” wrote a sixteen-year-old boy somewhere by himself in a darkened room, “and I am apt to fancy that I could be easily persuaded to marry again, provided I was sure of a[n] . . . agreeable companion.” That is how Benjamin Franklin, in 1722, catfished the entire city of Boston.
When James found out who was behind the Dogood letters, he was not pleased. It was one of the final breaking points between the brothers that led to Benjamin fleeing the city, presumably ahead of a mob of randy male readers of the New-England Courant.
At the height of Benjamin’s Widow Dogood period, James got himself into a bit of hot water with the Massachusetts Assembly. In the June 1722 edition of his paper, he published an anonymous article criticizing how slowly the assemblymen had been dealing with piracy. The illicit hijacking of citizens’ goods might not have moved the Assembly, but call them mean names in public and, by God, they will drop everything and make you pay. Failing to uncover the identity of the article’s author quickly enough, the now thoroughly motivated Assembly arrested and jailed James as the proprietor of the offending newspaper.
In an age when partisan networks and celebrity pundits enjoy the freedom to ignore facts and flout journalistic integrity pretty much at their own discretion, we sometimes forget that, at its birth, the American press was a loyal and subservient arm of the government. Its purpose was solely to inform the public of their leaders’ actions, not to challenge or question those leaders. In fact, doing so was often illegal. The idea of a free press wasn’t even considered a virtue at the time. William Berkeley, a seventeenth-century colonial governor of Virginia, infamously remarked, “I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall never have these [for a] hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them . . . God keep us from both!”
What happened to James Franklin in 1722 was the norm, not the exception, in the American colonies. Yet printing was legitimately needed for official documents, announcements, currency, dispersing laws, and the like. So how does a government (or a modern billionaire oligarchy, for that matter) keep its watchdog muzzled, leashed, and sedated?
Cash—and threats. But mostly cash.
Follow the money: the greatest leverage Colonial leaders had over their local presses was government printing contracts. As much as 90 percent of all printing in the colonies at this time fell under these types of contracts, and in many areas the printers worked exclusively at the invitation and with the blessing of their regional governments. This would be like a presidential administration today making it illegal for anyone besides a single hand-picked network to air press releases, addresses, and governmental news. Competition for contracts like these tends to carry the subtext Please pick us. We swear we’ll print whatever the hell you want.
This afforded colonial governments immense control over any information released to the public. Publish an article critical of your Assembly or governor, and your contract gets revoked. If you didn’t have a contract (see: James Franklin), then you could be arrested and prosecuted for “seditious libel.”
Some of the first rumblings of what we now recognize as freedom of the press emerged from conflicts over these government contracts. Here’s a typical scenario: The Pennsylvania Assembly awards its contract to Printer A. Printer B is like, Shit, what am I supposed to print now? The answer: anything you can to survive. In 1685, William Bradford (father of Andrew “the In-Law Whisperer”) was chastised by Philadelphia magistrates for publishing an attack on the Quakers. Bradford shot back, saying you really couldn’t blame him; there was so little to print in 1685 that he had to take work wherever he could find it. In another tussle with the government just a couple of years later, Bradford was told, “You know the laws, and they are against printing, and you shall print nothing without allowance.”
When publishing his newspapers in Philadelphia decades later, Benjamin Franklin echoed this economic motivation for a free press. By operating a press that was open to everyone, you had substantially more clients and a more stable base of readers. High ideals and a sense of protected rights eventually merged with the pursuit of wealth, birthing our freedom of the press—which is a pretty good description of America’s birth as well.
James Franklin was imprisoned for a month at the pleasure of the Massachusetts Assembly. When he was released, he was ordered to refrain from printing the New-England Courant. To get around this, he bequeathed the paper to Benjamin—or, at least that’s what he wanted the Assembly to think. Nullifying the original indenture, James made a show of publicly releasing his younger brother from apprenticeship and turning the entire business over to him. Privately, however, Benjamin was only a front. In fact, James strong-armed his younger brother into signing a new and secret contract to operate the Courant, essentially indenturing Benjamin to himself as both the apprentice and the master of the same newspaper.
Franklin remembered this as a “very flimsy scheme,” and it didn’t take long before he’d had enough. Normally, indentured servants don’t get to walk away from a job just because it doesn’t pay money, or your coworkers beat you, or your boss calls you pock-pitted and remarkably stupid. But as the fake head of a newspaper, Benjamin had all the freedom in the world to kick open the front door and wave good-bye with his middle fingers raised high. Any attempts to enforce his indenture would have resulted in said indenture becoming public—something James could ill afford if he wanted to steer clear of Boston prison cells.
Besides, Benjamin had learned enough of the trade during his time with the Courant that he could easily find employment at another printing house. He didn’t count on his brother going behind his back and bad-mouthing him to every printer in Boston. But, screw Boston; he could always go to New York. His father tried to prevent him from leaving, but Franklin arranged with the captain of a New York sloop to smuggle him out of the city. His cover story was that he’d “got a naughty girl with child, whose friends would compel me to marry her.”
Finding no work for a printer in New York, Franklin eventually made his way to Philadelphia, where he became the employee of one Samuel Keimer, a failed printer from London. One of only two printers in the city (the other was Franklin’s soon-to-be In-Law Whisperer), Keimer’s shop was an unmitigated disaster. His press was “shattered,” his font was “small [and] worn-out,” and he seemed wholly ignorant of how to print something effectively on paper.
Still, at least he paid, and in silver sterling no less. Keimer had come to Philadelphia when the city was populous enough to sustain a second printer operating without government contracts. Because he had to find paying gigs outside of Lady Columbia’s handouts, as a source of potential income, he looked to people who wanted to be in power but who weren’t. By economic necessity, printers without government contracts opened their presses to partisan politics. The existence of more than one printer in a Colonial city was another important step in the birth of the American free press.
After setting Keimer’s press in order, saving up a little of that sweet silver, and making friends with the governor of Pennsylvania, seventeen-year-old Benjamin boarded a vessel back to Boston. But this wasn’t some tail-between-the-legs, middle-of-the-night homecoming. It was a midday ticker tape parade. He was carrying a letter from Governor William Keith detailing the governor’s proposal to patronize the young Franklin’s new printing shop, pending his father’s approval. After seven months working hard in Philadelphia, Benny had stacks in his pocket and he was itchin’ to make it rain.
“I went to see [James] at his printing-house: I was better dressed than ever while in his service, having a genteel new suit from head to foot, a watch, and my pockets lined with near five pounds sterling in silver. He received me not very frankly, looked me all over, and turned to his work again.”
Walking up to James’s employees, Benjamin continued his victory lap. “One of them asking what kind of money we had [in Philadelphia], I produced a handful of silver and spread it before them . . . Then I took an opportunity of letting them see my watch; and lastly, (my brother still grum and sullen) I gave them a piece of eight to drink, and took my leave.” Spread your bling on the table, buy a round of beers, then pop and lock your way out the door.
Years later, James was still smarting from this scene. Asked by their mother why the two couldn’t reconcile, Benjamin later wrote that “he said I had insulted him in such a manner before his people that he could never forget or forgive it.” Because that’s how eighteenth-century ballers do it, son.
Josiah Franklin rejected the Pennsylvania governor’s proposal to set up Benjamin with his own shop. While generally impressed that his son had accomplished so much in the few months he’d been away, Josiah felt that the boy, at seventeen, was too young to be entrusted with his own business. (Embarrassing his older brother in his own shop probably didn’t help, either.) Upon receiving Josiah’s refusal back in Philadelphia, Governor Keith vehemently disagreed.
“There [is a] great difference in persons,” the governor replied to Benjamin; “and discretion [does] not always accompany years, nor [is] youth always without it.” And since Josiah was unwilling to aid in the establishment of his son’s printing shop, “I will do it myself,” said Keith.
Starting a business costs money, a lot of money. But the governor was enthusiastic, and eager to accommodate. After Franklin submitted a proposed inventory that amounted to about one hundred pounds sterling, Governor Keith suggested that the young printer travel personally to England to “choose the types, and see that everything was good of the kind.” Franklin agreed, and Keith told him that he’d write up a letter of credit and send it with him on the next ship to London.
Now, discretion may not always accompany years, as Keith observed, but Franklin was either too young or too inexperienced to realize what most Americans instinctively know today: never trust a politician. Don’t do it. Saying whatever his constituency wants to hear is pretty much what makes a politician a politician.
Upon his arrival in England, one of Franklin’s friends let him in on Governor Keith’s “character.” “[He] told me there was not the least probability that [Keith] had written any letters for me; that no one, who knew him, had the smallest dependence on him; and he laughed at the notion of the governor’s giving me a letter of credit, having, as he said, no credit to give.”
Politicians! The embarrassment Franklin must have felt at trusting one would have been surpassed only by the galling realization that sometimes fathers are right and you are wrong.
Stranded in London without money or prospects, Franklin found work as an apprentice in the printing shop of one Samuel Palmer. Over the next year, he worked as a pressman and a compositor, rising through the ranks and demonstrating to his English counterparts that Americans are hardworking, technically capable, and insufferably dry.
“My companion at the press,” wrote Franklin, “drank every day a pint before breakfast, a pint at breakfast with his bread and cheese, a pint between breakfast and dinner, a pint at dinner, a pint in the afternoon about six o’clock, and another when he had done his day’s work.”
That’s, what, six pints of beer at work every day? Before, during, and after breakfast? It’s like the alcoholic equivalent of hobbit meals. Pressmen in London were consuming enough alcohol on a daily basis to employ an “alehouse boy,” whose only job was to ferry beer between the pubs and the printing houses.
Franklin, on the other hand, drank exactly no beers at work each day. Unused to such high volumes of alcohol flowing through the workplace, he looked upon the actions of his beer-guzzling coworkers as “detestable,” and set out to change their ways. Hey, bugger off, Benjamin Franklin! says any American reader who wishes he could drink even one beer at work every day. But don’t be too harsh on young Franklin, dear reader. If it weren’t for him, you might still be British and saying things like “bugger off.”
“On occasion I carried up and down stairs a large form of types in each hand, when others carried but one in both hands. They wondered to see from this and several instances that the Water-American, as they called me, was stronger than themselves, who drank strong beer!” Strong to drink is strong to labor: probably the singularly most successful workplace lie ever perpetuated upon English business owners.
Indeed, strength, for pressmen, was one of the main requirements of the job. They spent so much of their day doing the hard labor of pulling a press that contemporary cartoons referred to them as “horses.” (On the other hand, compositors were later called “monkeys” because they sat hunched over and picked at small sorts of type from printing cases.)
Franklin “endeavored to convince [one fellow pressman] that the bodily strength afforded by beer could only be in proportion to the grain or flour of the barley dissolved in the water of which it was made; that there was more flour in a penny-worth of bread; and therefore, if he would eat that with a pint of water, it would give him more strength than a quart of beer.” Nothing like a little science to put workplace alcoholism in its place. Or not. “He drank on,” Franklin observed.
Young Benjamin probably was stronger than his English counterparts. Not only was he an energetic nineteen-year-old, but unlike most men in the 1700s, he swam, enjoyed fresh air and daily exercise, and ate a conscientiously healthy diet. He could haul twice the weight that other pressmen carried, and when he was promoted to compositor, he set his type with an “uncommon quickness,” which one could at least partially attribute to the alcohol-free clarity of his mind.
But why set type so fast? Why be the office ass-kisser? Oh, right, for the money. When you’re a compositor and you set type faster than anyone else, you get paid more. In most cases, compositors were paid by the number of lines of type they set. The faster you worked, the more was sent your way. When you were fast, “job” printing (essentially single-sheet compositions) and time-sensitive projects, which paid noticeably better, landed on your desk first. Add to this the copious amounts of disposable income you didn’t waste at the pubs, and you can see the financial advantages to being the one sober printer in the office. Their paying a tab of four or five shillings out of their wages every Saturday night caused Franklin to remark of his coworkers, “And thus these poor devils keep themselves always under.”
Still, Franklin paid for his responsible behavior in other ways. When you voluntarily withdraw from the office beer fund, for example, you can expect your fellow compositors to retaliate. In Franklin’s day, compositors selected letters from cases that were divided into separate sections for each letter of type, known as a “sort.” All the a sorts were in one section, the b sorts in another, and so on. The sorts for capital letters were further separated, at the topmost section of the case, thereby creating the terms uppercase and lowercase. Compositors knew their cases so well that they could pick sorts from each section without even looking, just as we type on a keyboard without staring at the keys. Mysteriously, Franklin’s sorts kept getting mixed up, greatly slowing his work. Disgruntled pranksters found other little ways of tripping him up as well. They transposed his pages. They broke his equipment. Sometimes they blamed the slipups on a ghost that was haunting the printing house. Being the office teetotaler was starting to cost Franklin in both the goodwill of his colleagues and in actual money.
Realizing his mistake, Franklin tried to build relationships with his colleagues in other ways. In place of their prebreakfast and breakfast ales, he helped his coworkers substitute the following meal: “a large porringer of hot water-gruel, sprinkled with pepper, crumbed with bread”—all for the three half-pence price of a pint of beer. Cast away your ale, brother printers, I present you this bowl of watered-down oat flour and soggy bread. (You just can’t go back far enough in time to find English food that isn’t bloody awful.)
After a year in Palmer’s shop, young Franklin finally made arrangements to return to Philadelphia. Once again taking up work with the incompetent printer Keimer, he soon realized he had outgrown his former employer. Why try to keep Keimer’s rotten ship afloat when he could build a new vessel and steer his own course? All he needed was two hundred pounds, or about two and a half years’ of his journeyman salary, to get things started.
Compared to the lightning-fast service and reasonable shipping and handling fees of the twenty-first century, Franklin’s acquisition of a printing press seems positively Stone Age. For one, the colonies weren’t even close to self-sufficient. If you wanted a printing press, you had no choice but to order one from abroad. You couldn’t skip down to the local expo and select the latest two-pull printing press showcased by bikini-clad tavern women. American-made products were universally recognized as expensive to produce, of limited quantity, and vastly inferior to their foreign counterparts. So poorly was Colonial industry regarded that even the idea of an American Bible was suspect; everyone assumed they would be less accurate than European Bibles. This belief was held not just by readers and clergymen from around Europe, but by Americans. It wasn’t until the middle of the American Revolution that a complete Bible in English would proudly be published by the patriot printer Robert Aitken. This 1781 edition issued in Philadelphia, known in the rare book world as the Aitken Bible, is coveted by collectors of Americana and Bibles alike, and can reach prices of $150,000 or more.
In addition to the presses themselves, paper and metal type also had to be ordered and shipped from England. Consider that, in the seventeen years Franklin personally ran his shops in Philadelphia, he purchased four thousand pounds of metal type. In any given shipment, thirty pounds were just replacement quotation marks. The first type foundry established on American soil didn’t even open its doors until 1796, thirteen years after the end of the American Revolution.
The paper situation wasn’t any more encouraging. At this time, the best-quality paper came from the British Isles. That wasn’t so bad, as long as you didn’t mind waiting enormous shipping times and potentially incurring water damage along the way. It was a common enough problem that in one contemporary advertisement, a binder in the colonies boasted of his ability “to bind books neatly and to take salt water out of books.”
It wasn’t very easy to acquire materials for binding books, either. Binding was an expensive addition to a product that was already expensive to produce. For this reason, books were much more commonly bound in sheepskin in the colonies, a notably cheaper option than the typical calfskin. Sheepskin comes with its own problems, however. The poorer-quality bindings don’t age well. As a result, a rare book dealer today can look at a shelf of worn sheepskin bindings and make a pretty good guess that it’s a collection of eighteenth-century American imprints.
Scarcity of materials was simply a way of life for Colonial printers. Broken type, poor-quality paper, and worn sheep bindings might have made American books look cheap and unimpressive next to their London counterparts, but that was the reality of printing in America. In some cases, these problems have even translated into high prices within the rare book market today. Many American imprints were issued “stitched”—that is, without any of that expensive binding, but simply with the sheets sewn together. Ironically, most eighteenth-century American pamphlets carry a premium for collectors if they remain “stitched as issued.”
The two hundred pounds sterling that Benjamin Franklin needed to open his own shop was not an easy sum to come by, but with the help of friends and investors (and despite one failed engagement), he was able to scrape together enough cash to make it happen. Now he was free to pursue the printer’s ultimate goal, which was documented as early as 1534: “nearly all master PRINTERS STRIVE first of all AFTER PROFIT.” But even with a printing press in hand, Franklin couldn’t just slap ink to type and make a living. Two printers stood firmly in his way: Andrew “the In-Law Whisperer” Bradford, who owned the government printing contracts; and Samuel Keimer, who swept up the leftover table scraps. Franklin had to break their stranglehold on Philadelphia, or go under.
The first step was to destroy his former employer. Three years before Franklin opened his own shop, Keimer contracted with the Philadelphia Quakers (or Friends, as they were known) to print The History of the Quakers. The tome was destined to be the largest and most expensive book printed in Philadelphia up to that point. At 722 pages, it was the size of a briefcase and may have contained more pages than all the books Franklin would later print over his twenty-year career. Keimer had been dragging his feet on this behemoth, so when Franklin opened his doors in 1728, he went behind Keimer’s back and stole the contract. It paid off, too. Franklin printed the last quarter of the book in about two months. Considering that there were five hundred copies printed for this edition, it would have taken a total of 361,000 individual pulls of the printing press to obtain every sheet for The History of the Quakers. If Keimer had been able to accomplish this at Franklin’s rate, he would have finished the Quaker history in nine months, not the three-plus years that had already stacked up.
The History of the Quakers was a brilliant success for Franklin. Not only was his work noticeably better than Keimer’s (which is funny, because Franklin worked on the first three-quarters of this book while in Keimer’s employ), but the speed with which it was printed afforded his business “character and credit.” As James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass put it, “the ostentatious, almost superhuman speed with which [Franklin and his associates] finished the job was designed to show everyone how industrious they were and how slothful Keimer had been all along.”
That was one nail in Keimer’s coffin. The second came with Franklin’s decision, in 1729, to begin printing a newspaper. Philadelphia already had a newspaper, Andrew Bradford’s American Weekly Mercury. According to Franklin, it was “a paltry thing; wretchedly managed, and no way entertaining,” but it was a newspaper nonetheless, with words and news and stuff. Why would anyone need more than one newspaper in a city? Back in 1720, when Franklin’s older brother started the New-England Courant, concerned friends made the argument that the American colonies already had a newspaper, the Boston News-Letter. “One newspaper [was], in their judgment, enough for America.”
Getting wind of Franklin’s plans, Keimer retaliated against the younger printer’s scheming and started his own newspaper first, the Universal Instructor in all Arts and Sciences: and Pennsylvania Gazette. As it turns out, Keimer was just as bad at running a newspaper as naming one. Wracking his brain for something that might give him an edge over Bradford’s Mercury, he came up with the brilliant (not brilliant) idea to headline each issue with an entry from a 1728 encyclopedia. Front-page news of issue number one would have been the lexical entry for “A.” Yes, just “A: “A vowel, and the first letter of the English alphabet. See LETTER, VOWEL, and ALPHABET; where what relates to A, considered in each of those capacities, is delivered.”
Whew. People in the 1720s found that about as interesting as you just did. Franklin publicly observed that, at the rate Keimer was publishing his newspaper, “It will probably be fifty years before the whole can be gone through”—if that were something a person would even want to do, which it was not. In the fall of 1729, struggling to keep the paper afloat, Keimer gave in and sold it to Franklin for pennies on the dollar. And in case you’re wondering . . . “Air.” That’s how far Keimer made it: Air.
Within a few months of selling out to Franklin (who mercifully shortened the paper’s name to the Pennsylvania Gazette), Keimer sold his shop to his apprentice and moved to Barbados. His apprentice couldn’t do any better and closed down within the year. That left just Andrew Bradford, the man who had very recently convinced Franklin’s potential in-laws to abandon their matrimonial negotiations. Time for some payback.
DISMANTLING BRADFORD’S organization would not be easy. Franklin had to follow the money, and that trail led right to the government contracts, delivery routes, and paper mills owned by the Bradford family.
Good morning, Mr. Franklin.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to undermine Andrew Bradford’s printing syndicate. This cheap Colonial piece of paper will self-destruct on its own in five seconds.
Good luck.
The first step in taking down Bradford was diverting that sweet, sweet government printing. Franklin’s plan was simple: let his work speak for itself. In March of 1729, as the official printer to the Assembly of Pennsylvania, Bradford printed the speech of Governor Patrick Gordon. Maybe familiarity and a false sense of job security caused Bradford to cut corners. The text he printed was a mess, full of clumsily arranged, broken, and missing letters. One look at the printed speech, and the Assembly would have been compelled to conclude, Clearly this man does not give a shit. But Franklin did give a shit, and he demonstrated it by reprinting the governor’s speech using aesthetically pleasing arrangements and fonts, and bold, clean, accurate letters. After Franklin circulated his copies for comparison (and with a bit of help from political allies), the Assembly voted to turn the government contracts over to him. Speeches, broadside proclamations, minutes of meetings, and official government news and documents all had to pass through his shop now.
Franklin’s newspaper stood to be his biggest moneymaker. The Gazette was objectively a better paper than Bradford’s Mercury. In addition to the stream of European headlines, Franklin reported news from neighboring colonies and strove for higher-quality offerings than his competitor. His newspaper introduced a unique blend of instructive and entertaining writing. “As I know the mob hate instruction, and the generality would never read beyond the first line of my lectures . . . If I can now and then . . . satirize a little . . . the expectation of meeting with such a gratification, will induce many to read me through, who would otherwise proceed immediately to the foreign news.”
But quality does not by itself guarantee selling power. If consumers can’t access your product, they aren’t going to buy it. This is where Bradford’s second stranglehold came into play: he was the postmaster of Philadelphia. The postmaster controlled the main distribution networks throughout the colonies. When Franklin began printing the Philadelphia Gazette in 1729, Bradford slapped a ban on any of his post riders carrying Franklin’s newspaper.
Franklin’s paper needed a steady stream of revenue from advertising. A lot of money was made using subscriber numbers to attract advertisers. One Colonial printer called advertisements “the life of a paper.” Because Andrew Bradford “kept the post-office . . . his paper was thought a better distributer of advertisements than mine, and therefore had many more, which was a profitable thing to him and a disadvantage to me.”
Advertisers want the biggest pool of potential consumers. Distribution determined the size of that pool. Without the postmastership, Franklin was severely handicapped. Not only was he missing out on advertising revenue, but he was having to dig into his own pockets to pay off Bradford’s postmen—“what [newspapers, etc.] I did send was by bribing the riders, who took them privately.”
Whatever finagling happened behind the scenes is lost to history, but all Franklin really needed to do to break Bradford’s postal siege was wait. In 1737, Colonel Spotswood, acting Colonial postmaster general, called on Bradford for an accounting of his books. Franklin uses words such as negligence, inexactitude, and lack of clearness and punctuality, when describing the reasons for Bradford’s sacking. “Inexactitude” sounds an awful lot like “embezzlementitude” to us. Whatever the details may have been, Bradford was fired, and the job was offered to none other than Benjamin “Whose Printing Business Ain’t a Profitable One Now?” Franklin. The issue of the Gazette that appeared just after this promotion contained twice as many ads as the one preceding it. By the time Franklin left the Gazette in 1748, subscriptions had jumped from ninety to fifteen hundred, and paid out eight hundred pounds per year. Advertising accounted for an additional two hundred pounds a year (roughly the cost of opening a whole new print shop annually). Together, these constituted more than 50 percent of Franklin’s income at his Philadelphia shop.
Next, the problem of paper. Ordering paper from England meant waiting out the enormous shipping times, and it carried the risk of incurring water damage. Purchasing from a local dealer would have been so much easier. The problem was, there weren’t many paper mills in the colonies. In Philadelphia there was only one, established in 1690 through a joint venture between the Rittenhouse family and William Bradford, father of Andrew. The Bradfords used their influence over the Rittenhouses to cut off paper to anyone they felt posed an economic threat to their organization. Back in the mid-1720s, Andrew Bradford forced Nicholas Rittenhouse and his son-in-law John Gorgas to stop supplying Keimer with local paper when he was attempting to print The History of the Quakers. They targeted Franklin in a similar manner, “forcing Franklin to use imported paper in everything he printed.” Considering the hazards of shipping, on top of poor exchange rates for colonists, imported paper could cut heavily into an American printer’s profits.
In 1733, Franklin was so desperate for paper that he had to go halfsies with his Bradfordian nemesis on a psalmbook because, without Rittenhouse’s support, he wouldn’t have had enough paper to finish the printing. This appears to have been the final straw for Franklin. A few months later, he began to setup a new local paper mill.
By the end of his career, Franklin claimed to have established eighteen paper mills in the colonies. Between 1739 and 1747, his ledgers recorded sales of eighty-three tons of rags sent to seven papermakers throughout Philadelphia, earning him in excess of a thousand pounds sterling silver. Franklin became the Godfather of American paper. In keeping with this theme, a wise man once said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” But Franklin’s nemesis was not a wise man. By attempting to choke out his competitors through a backroom paper drought, Andrew Bradford inadvertently created a monster, a papermaking Corleone monster with English silver running through its veins. It’s just business, Mr. Bradford, nothing personal. Well, you did break up my engagement and try to push my press out of Philadelphia, so, yeah, I guess it’s a little personal.
Government printing, postal distribution, and paper—these three haymakers certainly put Bradford off his feet, but it was the smaller body blows that really made Franklin the most successful printer in the colonies. The Gazette was going strong, and Poor Richard’s Almanack was introduced in 1732, selling thousands of copies a year for the next twenty-five years. Almanacs were immensely popular; print historian James Raven notes that in eighteenth-century England “more copies of almanacs were sold than all other types of publication put together.” These pamphlets contained articles of varying utility, from calendars, to weather forecasts, catalogues of British kings, dates of fairs, descriptions of road systems, nuggets of wisdom to be cross-stitched onto throw pillows, financial interest tables, and chronologies of “things remarkable.” They were also the source for most of your favorite Franklin quotes, such as “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards,” “He that drinks fast, pays slow,” and “Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
Franklin didn’t stop there. He knew how to “[contrive] a copper-plate press,” which helped him to win contracts for printing currency in Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Delaware. He made his own ink. He could “cast his own [metal] type when sorts were lacking, something no one else in America could do.” He eventually became the largest wholesale and retail bookseller in the colonies, dominating the transatlantic book trade. In an environment of chronic scarcity, the ability to create, control, and divert the American printing supply line was practically the equivalent of being able to print money, which he was also legally allowed to do.
But in addition to the high-minded newspapers, government speeches, and English literature, Franklin’s second-largest source of income was from small incidental contracts, or job printing. These were your blank forms, your handbills, bills of sales, apprentice indentures, powers of attorney, bail bonds; even labels for medicine bottles and “wrapping papers for soap and tobacco.” In the history of print, job printing is the intelligent but ugly older sister. Considering its value, job printing deserves a lot more attention than it gets, but this kind of printing hasn’t historically been as sexy to scholars and collectors as books.
Jobbing work comes in an enormous variety, from orders for four thousand salad oil advertisements to the first printing of the Declaration of Independence. They are usually printed cheaply and have a devastating rate of survival, which is all the more depressing when you consider what we can potentially learn from them. Many of these printed materials would have seemed utterly mundane to an eighteenth-century audience, but today they serve as valuable windows into the past, like printed receipts, lottery tickets, advertisements, and labels.
Yet, herein lies the problem. Most of this work seems so unremarkable or so fleeting that it doesn’t always register on our radar as important. The Dunlap broadside, the first printed copy of the Declaration of Independence, is one of those extravagant exceptions that proves the rule. In 1989 the twenty-fifth known surviving copy of the Declaration, printed by John Dunlap on the night of July 4, 1776, was discovered within the frame of an old painting bought for four dollars at a flea market. The document sold at Sotheby’s for $2.42 million in 1991; then it sold for $8.14 million when put up for auction again in 2000. On the other hand, most ephemera have typically sold for zero dollars at auction because such humble sheets aren’t deemed important enough to buyers. There are some exceptions, such as the nineteenth-century advertisement for carpet that artist William Blake was commissioned to illustrate. (This is a real thing: one scholar calls it “surely the most delightful carpet advertisement ever created.”) But would a collector normally be interested in an otherwise random advertisement for carpet from 1820? No, which is our loss. But as historians and collectors attach growing importance to this seemingly modest detritus of print, we’re seeing prices change and dealers handle job printing more. This is an important and exciting trend.
During the early years of the printing press, job printing sustained many printers. Given the time, labor, and materials required for these smaller printing jobs, they tended to be proportionally more profitable than projects we assume to be a printer’s bread and butter. This makes sense when you consider the financial risks of a larger project such as a book. With capital tied into long-term investments, printers “needed the relief of regular, quick turnover, relatively simple jobbing.” If Franklin sniffed out a path to make money, he followed it. These “little jobs” meant ready cash, and they were so important to Franklin’s business that he literally stopped the presses whenever an order came in.
Add to this the hefty revenue from paper and the general supplies sold out of his print shop (which could include not only stationery, but items such as medicine, chocolate, whalebone, pickled sturgeon, and Spanish snuff), and you can see that Franklin had cornered the market in almost every aspect of profitable Colonial printing. Soon Franklin was “indisputably the dominant printer in Philadelphia and the wealthiest in all the colonies.”
In 1742, after duking it out with Franklin for almost fifteen years, Andrew Bradford’s health took a turn for the worse. He died on November 24, at the age of fifty-six, leaving the remaining shards of his Philadelphia printing empire to be divvied up among his living heirs.
Franklin remained in the business for only another six years before he’d made enough money to retire extravagantly. They say the first million dollars is the hardest to make, and that saying is not a new one. Well, the “million” part is. “My business was now continually augmenting,” Franklin wrote, “and my circumstances growing daily easier, my newspaper having become very profitable . . . I experienced too the truth of the observation ‘that after getting the first hundred pound, it is more easy to get the second.’”
With that kind of disposable income, Franklin invested in other Colonial printers. “In 1733[,] I sent one of my journeymen to Charleston, South Carolina . . . I furnished him with a press and letters, on an agreement of partnership, by which I was to receive one-third of the profits of the business, paying one-third of the expense.”
With similar partners and associates in more than two dozen locations, including New York, New Haven, Lancaster, Newport, Annapolis, Williamsburg, Boston, and the Caribbean island of Antigua, Franklin created an actual news network that stretched out over the American colonies and beyond. The result was, as Green and Stallybrass have explained, “these partners and protégés all imitated Franklin’s business strategies, creating a sophisticated intercolonial communications network, one of the most dynamic in the world, with Franklin at the center.”
Franklin’s network was the eighteenth-century version of an information superhighway. It was ideally placed to collect and spread this information. Unlike London printers, who had the economic luxury of focusing only on printed products if they chose, Colonial scarcity required printers to diversify. This meant they were often involved in multiple businesses in the community, such as a coffeehouse and general store, or Franklin’s post office. (Thus the trend of bookstores with cafés, bemoaned by some bibliophiles today, is actually part of a long-standing tradition!) Among all these social and business connections, the local print shop would often become a gathering place for that community. Their newspapers became, as one contemporary described it, “vehicles of discussion, in which the principles of government, the interests of nations, the spirit and tendency of public measures, and the public and private characters of individuals, are all arraigned, tried, and decided.”
Rather than a collection of loose colonies, these networks facilitated the idea that Americans were becoming a unified group. Now when something happened in New York, it carried weight in South Carolina. When Bostonians protested unfair taxation by dumping tea into their harbor, and England responded by sending in the army, Americans knew that “what was happening in Massachusetts could happen to them.” Printing networks created a feeling that the colonies were all in this together. They were the crackling nervous system of the emerging body politic.
In the May 9, 1754, edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin included a woodcut illustration of a snake segmented into eight parts. Below was printed the phrase “Join, or Die.” This iconic image originally had nothing to do with American Independence. It was a call for unity during the French and Indian War to aid England in its struggle against France. Eleven years later, that same cartoon would be repurposed by William Goddard in the Constitutional Courant “as a symbol of colonial opposition to the Stamp Act in particular and British authority in general.” Goddard was one of the printers in Franklin’s network, and this network was ready to take action to defend itself when threatened.
The 1765 Stamp Act, a tax on paper goods in the American colonies to help pay for the French and Indian War, features prominently in the history of utterly stupid economic decisions. In theory, it seemed practical. A stamp act had been enforced in England in 1712, and no one revolted. Yet, when it was America’s turn, Parliament hadn’t considered the problem of chronic scarcity of materials. Many in the trade were barely scraping by as it was. Paper was the most expensive aspect of printing, and could annually exceed the cost of opening up a print shop. Now the British had slapped a tax on the single biggest monetary risk of printers’ precarious livelihood, and they were pissed off. By virtue of their career choice, they had a ready-made platform for venting their righteous indignation.
Newspapers across the colonies united in what can arguably be called the first American propaganda campaign. How did principles such as taxation without representation become so villainized in the public consciousness? Follow the money. In the middle of those debates were the printers, protesting the price-gouging Stamp Act, equating it to the ramblings of tyrannical English overlords.
In the pre-Revolutionary furor that swept the colonies, the number of publications doubled. Printers who stayed true to England to win conservative government contracts faced potential disaster when angry mobs came banging on their doors. In one memorable case, a mob stole large quantities of metal type from James Rivington’s Loyalist paper, the New-York Gazetteer, and melted it down to form bullets. Rivington fled New York soon after his house was torched by another mob, and then returned in 1777 to run the Tory Royal Gazette, while acting (or continuing to act?) as an agent for George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring.
Franklin himself was initially slow to endorse American independence over reconciliation with the British Empire. Living in London at the time as the unofficial ambassador of the American colonies, he was somewhat out of touch with the changing resolve of his countrymen. Notwithstanding, the appropriated “Join, or Die” woodcut came to be viewed in England as one of the most radical publications from America, and “Europeans often credited [Franklin] with starting the American Revolution.” It was as if Franklin’s massive printing network went all Skynet on the eighteenth century and became self-aware. Where Franklin preached patience and rapprochement, newspapers such as the Courant cried, Viva la revolución! Printing had stepped past its master, marching the American colonies toward liberty and independence.
Franklin did eventually come around. In an essay reprinted in Goddard’s newspaper, he sided with the anger of his fellow Americans over issues such as taxation without representation and the unjust reparations for damage done to the English economy. He publicly compared the situation—and this is real—to a Frenchman who holds a fireplace poker over a flame and then asks if he can insert said poker into the asshole of an Englishman. When the Englishman refuses, the Frenchman becomes irate and demands “payment for the trouble and expense of heating the iron.” According to Franklin, that’s what England was doing: attempting to anally penetrate Americans against their will (there is a word for that), and when the Americans resisted, England demanded reimbursement for the cost of the attempted assault.
Hit first in the money bags, printers followed their ideals and stepped beyond their supposed role as “mere mechanics” to fan the flames of revolution. Franklin’s printing network was one crucial stage upon which the struggle for American independence played out. From this dais, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” became more than words—they became a foundation. What was once a question of cash soon became a quest for rights self-evident.