SOME SEVENTY-TWO YEARS AGO C. R. HILDEBURN, at work on his compilation of Colonial
Pennsylvania imprints, saw clearly that if a scholar were to identify the mass of unsigned
presswork issuing from the shop of Benjamin Franklin, he must first study the distinctive type
which Franklin and his fellow craftsmen used. The state of printing in the Middle Colonies
made the conditions for such a study unusually favorable. In the early and middle decades of
the eighteenth century there were seldom more than a half-dozen important printers at work in
this whole cluster of Middle Provinces. The individual printer's array of type sizes was
limited, his fonts usually quite different from those of his competitors, and his use of the
same letter consistent over long years because type then was particularly hard to come by and
costly and difficult to replace.
Studying Franklin bibliography was not, however, Hildeburn's prime concern; he was engaged
in a pioneering venture of far wider scope and in the end attempted to identify all the
unsigned Pennsylvania presswork from that of William Bradford's lone press in 1685 to that
issued by the numerous printers of the Post-Revolutionary Era.[1] His contribution to Franklin studies was nevertheless the
first major one, and both Charles Evans in the first four volumes of his American Bibliography (1903-04) and W. J. Campbell in his Short-title
Checklist of Franklin Imprints (1918) have accepted as authoritative Hildeburn's
ascriptions of unsigned items to Franklin.
In a project so ambitious as that undertaken by Hildeburn, inaccuracies are almost
inevitable, and recent research has shown them to be serious enough in Franklin bibliography
alone to force a restudy of that material. Hildeburn, understandably, missed both signed and
unsigned Franklin printing which has since come to light, but in addition
he mistook Baskerville type for Caslon and hence ascribed to Franklin's press work which must
have been done at least fifty years later. He identified type as Franklin's, which was not in
his shop or in that of his competitors. He assumed that Franklin had a monopoly on government
printing in the Province and ignored type evidence which indicated otherwise, and left unnoted
printing done by Franklin but signed by fellow craftsmen. In short, Hildeburn did not pursue
his type studies systematically or apply consistently his knowledge. And in his work on
Sewel's
History of the Quakers (1728) he failed to perceive that his
type knowledge was the only tool by which he could solve his bibliographical problem.
[2]
Hildeburn's most significant contribution to Franklin then, perhaps, is his demonstrating
the fruitfulness of his approach through a knowledge of type, and for the student intent on
studying anew the whole of Franklin's printing and publishing activities, as I am, the goal is
clearly to move in the direction which Hildeburn has indicated and hope to avoid his
errors.
The type which Franklin owned falls into three divisions: (1) the variety of letter which he
used at the Passy press during his sojourn in France from 1776 to 1785 and later brought back
to America and sold in part to the New York printer Francis Childs; (2) the arrays of fonts
with which Franklin stocked the houses of his numerous printing partners at work in colonies
other than Pennsylvania, within the Province of Pennsylvania but not in Philadelphia, or
within Philadelphia but printing in German rather than English; and (3) the large body of type
which Franklin used in his original printing house established in Philadelphia in the spring
of 1728 and relinquished in January of 1766 to David Hall, the reliable Scotsman whom he had
taken into partnership eighteen years before in 1748.
This present paper deals exclusively with the type last mentioned — that with which
Franklin started his career and that used later in the same shop by Franklin and Hall trading
as partners. The objectives of the study are principally historical and descriptive. Mr.
Lawrence C. Wroth has succeeded admirably in indicating generally where the colonial American
printer acquired his type, how much he bought, what sometimes it cost, and how he used it.[3] This paper will offer the fuller
information on these points to be gleaned from an intensive
study of a
single eminent and very enterprising colonial printer like Franklin. The other objective, and
as an aid in future research far the more important, is the identification and cataloguing of
all of Franklin's type, establishing approximate terminal dates for the use of various fonts
and finally supplying plates of each of Franklin's text types together with selected examples
of the differing faces used in the shops of his competitors.
The resources for carrying on this Franklin investigation, despite my evident inability to
find conclusive answers for all the important questions, are extraordinary — richer
certainly than those for any other colonial American printer practising his craft in the
middle decades of the eighteenth century — and perhaps because of their odd variety
merit a comment at the outset. The single most important material is, of course, the large
amount of extant printed matter issuing from Franklin's shop: the weekly issues of his
newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette, and the more than 500 preserved
Franklin imprints. Next in significance are the revealing observations in the Autobiography and scattered comments among the thousands of published
Franklin letters, especially those in the Strahan-Hall-Franklin correspondences. The important
new material, much of it previously unstudied, is the David Hall manuscripts — a series
of letter books covering the entire period of the Franklin-Hall partnership, business papers
of Hall and of Franklin and Hall recently rediscovered, and a few important new Franklin-Hall
letters not known before to exist. Related to these, and ideally suited for this study are the
papers of James Parker, Franklin's former printing partner in New York City, commissioned as
the agent of Franklin during his stay in London, to reach an equitable settlement with Hall
upon termination of the Franklin-Hall partnership. The key document is an itemized list of the
firm's complete type holdings in January of 1766, by size, weight, state of wear, and
estimated monetary value.
