University of Virginia Library

Franklin's Poor Richard Almanacs: Their Printing and Publication
by
C. William Miller [*]

On December 28, 1732, Benjamin Franklin announced in the Pennsylvania Gazette that he had just published the first edition of a new almanac, the Poor Richard for 1733, by Richard Saunders, Philomath. The address to the reader was an amusing one in which Richard pleaded poverty as his reason for undertaking the writing of the almanac and concluded with the prediction that Mr. Titan Leeds, the writer of the most popular almanac in the Middle Colonies, would die in October of the ensuing year. The Swiftian trick was an old one, and Franklin's delaying until after the other Philadelphia almanacs were on sale to launch his new publication seems on the surface to have been ill-timed, but the purchasers liked what they read, bought out the first edition, and called for a second, and then a third during the early weeks in January. In this final printing Franklin appears either to have over-extended himself or to have set his sights on a market larger than that of the Province of Pennsylvania, for in March, 1733, he shipped 500 almanacs to his partner Whitmarsh in Charleston, and in the following August, 300 and 200 almanacs respectively to his brother James in Newport and Thomas Fleet in Boston, this last at 1/5/0 per hundred, a figure twenty-five per cent higher than Franklin was to charge Whitmarsh for new ones the next year. It is remarkable enough that a Boston bookseller would be interested in Philadelphia almanacs which were almost out of date—harder to believe that he would buy them for the price he did. Perhaps in the intervening months the reputation of the Poor Richard had spread to New England, and Fleet saw an opportunity belatedly to satisfy the curiosity of his customers. In any case Franklin successfully rid himself of the remainder of his third impression and made a

start in creating a geographically wider market for his next year's almanac.

Thus began the successful publication of the Poor Richard almanacs, a series that ran on into the nineteenth century though Franklin was responsible as author only for the first twenty-five, those from 1733 to 1758. By 1739 the sales had risen so sharply that the almanac-maker presented himself in his preface as hard-pressed to justify any longer his name "Poor" Richard, but excused himself jestingly with the claim that "When I first began to publish, the printer made a fair Agreement with me for my copies, by virtue of which he runs away with the greatest Part of the Profit." Eventually as Franklin states in his Autobiography the printing reached "annually near ten thousand"[1] copies, and when finally in the almanac for 1758 Franklin strung together a selection of his wise-sayings in the form of an old man's rambling discourse on economy, publishers here in the colonies and in Europe began reprinting the piece under the title A Way to Wealth and quickly created for Poor Richard an international reputation.

So much for the widespread popularity of Franklin's almanacs and the main facts of their publication which to Franklin scholars are a familiar story. My principal concern here is to deal with the hitherto unattended study of the printing of these famous almanacs: (1) the imposition, (2) the determination of reimpressions, (3) the problems of the text, and finally (4) their sale and distribution.

Before I turn to this fourfold discussion, however, it is necessary to clarify two matters. The first is that, under the name of Richard Saunders, Franklin published not one but three separately titled almanacs: the original Poor Richards from 1733 to 1747, the enlarged Poor Richards Improved from 1748 to 1758, and starting in 1741, the much smaller Pocket Almanacs. I plan in this paper to deal only with the first two series of publications. The Pocket Almanacs, strikingly different in format and text from the others, merit separate study.

The second matter needing brief consideration is the number of copies extant today. Franklin, as we noted earlier, fixed the peak number of copies printed in any one year as near ten thousand, but he does not tell us when publication reached that level; it is improbable that he was printing anything like that number in the first years. But even if, from the number of copies preserved, we were to assume that he ran off 3600 copies in 1733, and half again as many in each of the

next few years, it is clear at the outset that we can scarcely hope to reconstruct the full history of their printing.

No one library has a complete run of the first fifteen almanacs. Of the 1733 almanac there exist two copies, neither of which is the first state of the first printing where Franklin acknowledged in the Gazette that he had mistakenly transposed two pages. The largest number of copies preserved for any single year is twelve; the average for most of the others is eight, though of the Poor Richards for 1734, 1735, and 1745, we have but three copies apiece.

Copies of the Poor Richards Improved are somewhat more numerous. The average for each of the years from 1748 to 1758 is seventeen, with eleven libraries possessing complete runs though approximately one-quarter of these are imperfect.[2]

With this background we may turn now to the first of the major considerations—the format and imposition of the first fourteen of the original Poor Richards, from the start in 1733 through the almanac for 1746. In their perfect states these almanacs consist of three unsigned gatherings in 4's—in all, twelve leaves. The format is octavo with each four-leaf gathering consisting of one-half sheet of Pro Patria stock, a paper roughly 12½" by 15½" which Franklin used almost exclusively during his first decade of printing. Described in terms which an eighteenth-century London bookseller would understand, the Poor Richard resembles somewhat those British almanacs called "sorts." It devotes one, not two, pages to each month; offers the reader no blank pages for notes, though a handful have survived interleaved; and beginning with the almanac of 1735, it prints the holy days in black letter but without rubrication.

Franklin had open to him two methods of imposition. He could have imposed formes of two of his three signatures together (twin half-sheet imposition), or he could have imposed together the outer and inner formes of a gathering (single half-sheet imposition), and after perfecting end with two copies of the same signature. The evidence points to Franklin's journeymen having used regularly the second method, for numerous copies contain watermarks in all three gatherings and exhibit the use of the identical rules in the rule-frames of all three signatures.

The second major consideration—that of determining reimpressions—offers no great obstacles among the very earliest Poor Richards. Franklin himself indicated "The Third Impression" of the 1733 almanac

and the "Second Edition" of the Poor Richard for 1734 on the title-pages (Plate 1, no. 2).

The difficulty arises, however, with the almanacs of the late 1730's and early 40's where one finds in the text little more than proof corrections, dropped letters, and changes in alignment as the bases for distinguishing the several impressions which Franklin advertised in the Gazette that he had run off. It is possible by these means to determine tentatively a few of the impressions, but the one piece of evidence for distinguishing the various reprintings, I discovered, lay not within the letterpress but in the varying configurations and broken parts of the single rules framing each page of text. Confirmation of the validity of this evidence occurs first in the labeled later printings of the 1733 and 1734 Poor Richards where the rule-frame for each page differs in its configuration from those in the earlier printings, and, second, in the direct and consistent correspondence between frame-rule patterns and marked variants in the text.

Working with the evidence of the varying rule patterns, I turned first to the 1737 almanac where among the seven extant copies there occur no variants in the text. The compositor in imposing his formes treated the frame-rules as parts of the furniture and after each machining inserted the letterpress for the new forme page for page into positions occupied by the corresponding pages in the previous forme. All seven copies are clearly from the same printing with the rule-frames matching exactly, gathering after gathering in both the outer and inner formes.

Distinguishing the several impressions of the 1738 almanac is more difficult, partly because the printing of the Poor Richards had apparently by this year settled into a routine shop procedure involving compositors with different work habits hurrying to complete their jobs, and partly because it became evident that the rule-frame configurations while suggestive offered too many variations to be completely reliable evidence. The only trustworthy guide here proved to be several distinctive broken frame-rule fragments in one series of formes. These could be traced in whatever position they occurred.

With their help it was possible to distinguish two impressions of the 1738 almanac. The compositor in this year followed the method of imposition of his fellow worker in the 1737 Poor Richard with but one exception. Instead of transferring his furniture page for page and corresponding forme for forme, he moved it in one impression exhibited by the Huntington copy from inner A to outer B and C, and in the

other impression, of which the remaining ten preserved copies are examples, from outer A to inner B to outer C.

The surest way of telling the two impressions apart is to locate and follow the reoccurrences of a short (7 mm.) side-rule fragment appearing always near the top of the frame. In the one impression it stands as a part of the right side-rule on A2, B1, and C1; in the other, it forms a part of the left side-rule on A2v, B1v, and C2v.

The proof for determining which of the two impressions of the 1738 almanac was first printed is equally clear-cut. In the Huntington copy page B3v (Plate 3, no. 1) exists in the unproofed state; the identical page in the New York Public copy (Plate 3, no. 2) and the other nine extant copies is corrected. Since the rule-frame evidence just presented indicates that the printing of the Huntington copy was a continuous process, the priority claimed for B3v holds for the other pages of the text as well; and the Huntington copy stands, therefore, as the one preserved example of the first impression; the remaining ten copies, as examples of the second.

Distinguishing the reimpressions of the 1739, 1740, and 1742 almanacs is not so simple as that for the 1738 almanac. For one reason, not all of these almanacs have broken rules; but more important, I encountered evidence that makes futile the attempt to label precisely the several reprintings of these three almanacs. The copies of the Poor Richard for 1739 highlight the problem. A broken top-rule in the American Philosophical Society copy with the break toward the left occurs on A3v, B4v, and C3v (Plate 3, no. 3), a not unexpected inner-outer-inner alternation. The same broken top-rule occurs also in all three signatures of the Boston Public copy, but this time the rule falls on C4v rather than on C3v, and in the A and C signatures is turned about so that the break is closer to the right than to the left—all evidence pointing clearly to another printing. The difficulty arises with the B signature where the rule break on B4v lies closer to the left than to the right, just as in the APS copy. Any speculation that the MB copy is unique, and this confusion perhaps the result of sophistication, is demonstrated to be false, for the copies in the Rosenbach, Yale, Pennsylania, and Library Company collections agree with the Boston Public. The lone reasonable explanation which does not contradict the orderly procedure of imposition exhibited by the other Poor Richards is that Franklin's binders stitched together at random half-sheets from different printings. This explanation would help also in accounting for the odd combination of gatherings in the Franklin Institute copy where the

rule break on A3v lies to the right as in the MB copy, but where the B and C gatherings, unlike those of any other extant copy, contain no broken rules—evidence that Franklin either replaced the fragmented rules during the second impression or ran off still a third impression.

The likeliest explanation for this apparent confusion which I can offer, and I do so only conjecturally, is this. Franklin, knowing that he could not tie up his press at any time long enough to run off all the copies of an almanac needed in a given year, anticipated the demand by machining several smaller impressions as his press fell free. A printing of 1200 copies run off at the rate of 250 sheets an hour would take only a day and one-half of steady presswork if Franklin's pressmen could match the pace which those in Moxon's day were capable of setting.[3] After each of the printings except the last, Franklin normally kept his type standing, having removed the type pages from the forme, laid aside the rules, and bound the pages of standing type with twine until they were needed for another run. When that time came, his compositor reimposed the type pages, fitted them with new rules or the old ones in whatever configuration they happened to fall, and locked his forme. Thus, it is possible to account for the several different impositions which probably represented in Franklin's thinking merely interrupted segments of a single long machining and can only technically, therefore, be termed distinct impressions. Further, it explains how when Deborah Franklin and her helpers came to the stitching, they had sheets from two or three printings to draw upon.

The format and imposition of the last of the original Poor Richards, the almanac for 1747, differ from those of its predecessors and offer an easy transition to the consideration of the printing of the Poor Richards Improved, the first of which appeared in the following year, 1748. The 1747 almanac, like the earlier ones, contains three unsigned gatherings in fours, but the format in this year is duodecimo, not octavo. The chain-lines run horizontally and segments of watermarks appear toward the top of the outer margins. Franklin had thus in 1747 discarded his three Pro Patria half-sheets per copy in favor of one sheet of demi, roughly 15" by 20" and marked with a fleur-de-lis.

The shift from octavo to duodecimo, I believe, was experimental, looking forward to the publication in 1748 of his "Improved" almanac, enlarged to thirty-six pages. This increase permitted Franklin to devote two pages of text to each month in imitation, as he explained in the preface, of the "well known method" of his friend Jacob Taylor, whose

long established almanac had stopped appearing with his death in 1746. Franklin in the interval had arranged with the colonial papermakers to supply him with adequate supplies of the larger sheets—the initials in the watermarked paper of the later almanacs can be traced to local mills—and had almost certainly acquired a new press with a larger platen than his first one. The firm of Franklin and Hall owned at the dissolution of their partnership in January, 1766, according to James Parker, "Three Presses, one much shattered."[4]

The Poor Richards Improved for 1748 to 1758 were printed on one and one-half sheets of demi paper imposed in duodecimo with six signed gatherings, A4 B2 C4 D2 E4 F2. It is likely that Franklin and Hall followed the established practice of printing this new almanac in three half-sheets as they had done with the old one, but there is no clear evidence to prove the point. In these later almanacs each page of text is enclosed with a frame of double-rules usually so well fitted that they offer no distinctive variations in configuration helpful in distinguishing reimpressions. The formes do contain a series of recurring broken rules, but their evidence is useful only in establishing how David Hall, Franklin's former journeyman, and after 1747 his working partner, handled the storing of the standing type used in succeeding editions.

It had been Franklin's practice from the outset to keep standing as much of the text of the Poor Richards as he could reprint with only slight alteration the following year; this included the title-page, the month head-titles, the numbering of the days, the holy days set in black letter, a group of recurring features, and nearly all of the final signature—the places and dates of court sessions and fairs, advertisements, and the routes with mileage from Philadelphia northeastward to Norridgewock and southwestward to Charleston. He stored this type without the accompanying frame-rules. Starting with the Poor Richard Improved for 1748, Hall carried over from one year to the next the double-rule frames with the standing type. Two broken side-rules present in the 1748 almanac reappear in the frames of copies for each succeeding year until 1758 when Hall replaced all of the frame-rules. James Parker, Franklin's former partner in New York and his agent at the dissolution of the Franklin-Hall partnership in 1766, confirms the bibliographical evidence of Hall's practice by a chance remark in a letter to Franklin in England dated February 3, 1766, some two months after the 1766 almanac had been printed: ". . . we weigh'd the Forms

and Pages of Almanacks etc. with all their Rules in and about them. . .."[5]

The analysis of the printing procedures for the original Poor Richards and for the Poor Richards Improved just presented indicates comparatively few significant departures from normal printer's practice; it does, however, verify Franklin's announcement of reprintings, sometimes as frequently as three within a year, especially among the almanacs from 1733 to 1747. The next question—and the third major consideration in this paper—is what textual variations do the almanacs show, particularly those several times reprinted.

At the outset it is worth remembering that printers thought of these publications as primarily a money-making venture. They ran off large quantities of the popular ones, sold them very cheaply, and since the demand fell largely during the months of December and January, realized a quick return on their investment. Franklin's attitude toward his Poor Richards, I am convinced, was no exception despite his being author as well as printer and despite his growing pride in the widespread popularity of his almanac. My collating of the texts of the extant copies has turned up frequent textual variation, but no extensive rewriting. Franklin's chief concern was to see his original text reproduced in type accurately and literally correctly. The many changes that occur stem almost entirely from efforts to make do with inadequate stocks of type or from his workmen's faulty practices, over which, even during his years as master, Franklin seemed helpless to exercise control.

Like any good printer he insisted that his almanac copy be proofread; this practice did not, of course, prevent some unproofed sheets like the B gathering in the Huntington copy of 1738 (Plate 3, no. 1) from getting into circulation. Stop-press corrections waste press time; consequently few of them are to be found in the Poor Richards. Franklin's practice where several impressions were planned was usually to make the corrections between printings. In the lone impression of the 1745 almanac Franklin did, however, stop his press, but only long enough to insert an errata list in the A signature covering the misprints in gatherings B and C. In doing so, he indicates incidentally the reverse order in which he machined the signatures. First, he ran off the C gathering, the one which consisted largely of text kept standing from year to year and which could therefore be made ready most conveniently for the press, then the B gathering, and, finally, the A signature, containing the preface, the portion which Franklin, were he pressed for time, could compose last without delaying the printing of the greater portion of the almanac. That the errata list is actually a stoppress

insertion is evident in that it occurs in the New York Public copy (Plate 3, no. 4) but is missing from that of the American Antiquarian Society.

The major factor contributing to widespread textual variation, however, especially in the original Poor Richards, was Franklin's limited font of long primer, both text letter and planet sorts, and his very short supply of long primer black letter. The frequent scattered variants conjure up a picture of Franklin's compositors continually filching letter from the standing type of the almanacs between printings for use in other current printing, and later replacing it, at times carelessly. In several Poor Richards one finds new literal errors occurring in second and third impressions which carry proof corrections caught after the first run.

The greatest disturbance in the text appears in those few instances where the compositors were forced for lack of letter to tear down whole pages or entire signatures and then reset them, probably hurriedly, for the new settings are often textually inferior to the original ones. The reset page in the 1740 almanac, for instance, is markedly faulty by Franklin's standards (Plate 4, no. 3).

So far I have dealt generally with the many minor variants to be found throughout the texts of the Franklin almanacs, particularly in the early ones. Once the printing house began to prosper, acquire additional fonts and presses, and increase the number of journeymen, the printing of the Poor Richards became a less eventful procedure. By 1750 Hall was running off most of his yearly large editions as a single operation. The variants disappear except where stop-press changes were intended beforehand or a rare mistake occurs.

It remains now to discuss in detail those almanacs notable for their variants, certain of which have heretofore gone unrecorded. Those widely recognized for years by collectors and rare book dealers include the two printings of the 1733 almanac. The earlier Rosenbach Museum copy is reproduced in the initial volume of The Writings of Benjamin Franklin (1959) and "The Third Impression" owned by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania was reprinted in facsimile by The Duodecimos in 1894. Of the twenty-four pages in the Rosenbach copy, four entire pages and portions of six others are in a setting different from that of the HSP copy. Franklin announced in the Gazette three impressions of the 1733 almanac. Whether the Rosenbach copy is a part of the corrected issue of the first impression—it does not have the months of September and October transposed—or of the second impression it is not possible to determine in the light of present knowledge.

Well known also is the unique copy of the "Second Edition" of the 1734 almanac in the library of the American Philosophical Society (Plate 1, no. 2). Three of its pages and portions of three others are in a different setting from that of the first edition. The textual variants in it as in the 1733 almanac resetting are confined to changes in capitalization, spelling, and punctuation.

Equally well known are Franklin's two stop-press alterations in the almanacs of 1744 and 1748, designed it seems to stimulate wider sale of his Poor Richards outside the Province of Pennsylvania. In the Huntington and HSP copies of the 1744 almanac Franklin has altered the imprint to read: "Printed and sold by B. FRANKLIN. Sold also by JONAS GREEN at Annapolis" (Plate 5, no. 2). No other bookseller enjoyed this special designation in the entire twenty-five years of Franklin's authorship.

The alternate page settings of F1v in the 1748 almanac are, for readers living in the Middle Colonies, a listing of the Pennsylvania governors, speakers of the Assembly, and mayors of Philadelphia (Plate 5, no. 3); and, for New England readers, a listing of the dates of court sessions in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island (Plate 6, no. 1). Two other such substitutions which appear to have escaped notice occur in the Boston Public copy of the 1749 almanac (Plate 6, no. 2) and in the Yale, Huntington, and New Jersey Historical Society copies of the 1751 almanac. In the MB copy of 1749 the page-long listing of the New England court dates appears on F2 in place of "A TABLE for the more ready casting up of Coins, in Pennsylvania" found in all the other copies of the 1749 almanac which I have examined; in the Yale, Huntington, and New Jersey Historical Society copies of 1751 the same New England court list replaces on F2v the mileage table for roads northeastward and southwestward found regularly in preserved copies of the 1751 Poor Richard Improved. In the MB, New Jersey Historical Society, Huntington and Yale copies the court list is printed from the same body of standing type, differing from the New England court list in the MB copy of the 1748 almanac (Plate 6, no. 1) only in the relineation of the Connecticut court list and the expansion of the text of the courts of Rhode Island.

The variants in the almanacs of 1736, 1749, and 1755 constitute the principal new material emerging from this study. That of 1755 is more of a bibliographical oddity than an important textual change. Hall's compositor reversed in his imposition of the D signature the two pages of the month of September (Plate 8, no. 3), committing once again the mistake Franklin had made in his first Poor Richard. The only copy that I have found with the error is that in the Boston

Public Library; the other extant copies show the correct arrangement.

More significant is the discovery that the copy of the 1736 Poor Richard in the Library of the American Philosophical Society is a unique resetting (Plate 2) —the one almanac of the original fifteen which may be said to exist virtually in two editions, though Franklin gave no hint of this fact either on the title-page or in his announcement in the Gazette. In all, seven copies of the almanac have come down to us, one of them from the second printing, the result possibly of Franklin's having to work with a limited font of long primer; the other six, parts of the first uncorrected edition. The several jobs he had in hand at the time reveal, I think, the cause of his difficulties.

In the final months of 1735, Franklin's shop-force was working on three almanacs, Franklin's and those of John Jerman and Jacob Taylor, the largest number which Franklin had yet attempted to print in one year. All three are advertised as "now in press" in the Gazette on November 13. If we may rely on the "Just Published" announcements that appear in the later issues of the Gazette for the order in which Franklin printed the almanacs, the Jerman almanac was finished first (November 27). Jerman invariably included some features so similar to those later used by Franklin in the Poor Richards that the printer found it convenient to print whole pages of the same type-setting in both almanacs. The second almanac printed was Franklin's (December 4), and then came Taylor's (December 24).

Once the presswork was completed on the Poor Richard, it is clear from a comparison of the APS copy with the earlier ones that the compositor distributed the type for all pages except the title and the final four leaves, the greater portion of which Franklin regularly kept standing from year to year. One can only guess at the reasons for Franklin's consenting to the distribution of the type. Perhaps he thought he had printed enough copies to satisfy the trade and then later discovered that he had underestimated the demand, or it could be that if he kept the text of his Poor Richard standing, his compositor would lack sufficient letter to set the Taylor almanac. Whatever the circumstances, this much is clear. At some point after running off Taylor's almanac, Franklin saw that he needed more copies of his own almanac.

In the type-setting that followed, more extensive by far than that in any of the other original Poor Richards, Franklin added point to his jesting in the preface by italicizing the phrases "appear publickly" and "in print" (Plate 2, no. 2), corrected several transposed planet symbols on A3v, replaced two black-letter T's mistaken for C's on B4v, and made a major change in typographical arrangement that set the pattern for

his later almanacs. It is this last alteration that offers conclusive proof of the order of the two settings rather than the textual corrections, for in the other Poor Richards, much resetting usually done in haste tends to yield inferior, not superior textual readings. In the almanacs prior to this one of 1736 and in the first printing of this almanac, Franklin set in italic type both his weather predictions and his wise-sayings throughout the left-hand column of the calendar for each month. In the second edition of 1736, and in the later almanacs, he set the prognostications in roman and only the wise-sayings in italic, presumably to distinguish the one from the other more clearly for his reader. The evidence that Franklin had decided in the first printing to set both predictions and proverbs in italic type, and only later decided to reset the predictions in roman rests with the typographical pattern found in "November" and "December" (C1 and C1v), the two months out of the twelve in which the type was left standing after the first printing, and therefore used again in the second printing. In these two months both predictions and wise-sayings are set in italic type. Hence in six of the seven copies of the 1736 almanac, which I have labeled parts of the first edition, the typographical pattern is consistent throughout all twelve months; in the APS copy—the lone copy of the second printing —the pattern is consistent for the first ten months, and then markedly different in the last two.

The Poor Richard Improved for 1749 offers clearly the most interesting variants I have encountered in this investigation. A starting point is the attention Franklin himself focused upon its text in the preface to his almanac for 1750. He wrote:

Poor Richard's confession appears to be a full and candid one both for his own errors and those of his printer, and couched as it is in

somewhat bantering terms was evidently designed to amuse his readers and to dispel any bad opinion they may have harbored concerning the previous edition. Further, some readers must have remembered Poor Richard's earlier insistence in perpetuating the jest that he was an individual in his own right (Plate 2, no. 2), and not Franklin, both the author and the printer. But in the 1749 almanac for the first time matters were different. Franklin was only the author, and David Hall, Franklin's newly acquired partner, had the sole responsibility for printing the almanac. The 1750 almanac preface read in this light may perhaps take on a somewhat different meaning, and with what mixed feelings Hall viewed Franklin's public reprimand of his work one can only guess.

An examination of the text and printing of the 1749 almanac reveals even more interesting detail on what may possibly have been a momentarily strained relationship between the new partners. The almanac, I found, exists in not one but two printings, the only edition of the Poor Richards Improved to appear in this fashion. Further, in the second impression the three pages of the address to the reader have been entirely reset (Plate 7, no. 2).

What disturbed Franklin, now retired from an active role in the printing business and absorbed in his scientific studies, was, I suspect, finding in a copy of the first printing of the 1749 almanac which came to hand the omission of the "2" in the phrase "24000 Miles." His discovery of the error was mere chance, for the missing numeral having been pushed down had stopped inking during the run and was, therefore, neither the result of compositorial carelessness nor faulty proofreading. Three extant copies of the first machining, those in the Library of Congress, Boston Public, and the American Philosophical Society, reveal the "2" faintly inked. Franklin's statement ". . . in some Copies . . . the Figure 2 being omitted . . ." I construe to mean not the variant readings in the first printing, but the re-elevation of the numeral in the second impression where in the preserved copies it appears consistently. A non-inking type was, of course, no unique fault with Hall's printing. One can find a dozen occurrence of the same sort in the earlier Poor Richards printed during the years in which Franklin had been master of the printing house.

If my assumption is accurate—and it is buttressed by the fact that none of the other errors mentioned in the 1750 preface were caught either by Franklin or Hall in time to be rectified in the second printing —then it was ostensibly the missing "2" that brought Franklin down to the printing shop to register a protest. What he found must have

pleased him. Hall had completed his first impression and had in fact ordered the distribution of the type in the three pages of the preface. It is difficult to believe that Franklin would have insisted on Hall's resetting the three pages and running off another impression merely to correct one error. Evidently Hall had been obliged to redistribute some of his standing letter and free his press for a more urgent job, and planned on a second impression later.

Franklin saw to it that the "2" was inking properly and took the opportunity to revise and enlarge the section on the Courts of Assize in Maryland (Plate 7, no. 4). What Franklin does not mention in the 1750 preface is that he had discovered or had called to his attention another error of his own making which he quietly corrected—or thought he had corrected—in the only other rewritten passage to be found within different machinings of a single almanac. As an historical note under November he had written: "The 5th of this month, November, seems to be a lucky day to the English church and British liberty; for on that day 1588, the popish gunpowder treason was detected; and on the same day in 1688, just one hundred years after, our glorious deliverer from popery and slavery, King William, landed at Torbay." (Plate 8, no. 1). In the second impression Franklin, of course, changed "1588" but to "1604" instead of the correct date, 1605, and deleted "just one hundred years after"; reluctant, however, to forego the allusion to significant events occurring in the year '88 of succeeding centuries, he added: "Eighty-eight seems likewise a lucky year; for in 1588 was the Spanish Armada defeated" (Plate 8, no. 2).

Finally as the fourth major consideration in this paper, it seems appropriate in an investigation that concerns itself with the history of the printing and publication of the Poor Richards, to attempt to bring together the sketchy and scattered facts relating to their sale and cost. From the outset in 1733 Franklin designed his almanac for use principally in Pennsylvania and the surrounding colonies. On his title-page he announced that it was "Fitted to the Latitude of Forty Degrees," which is that of the city of Philadelphia, but went on to add, that it ". . . may without sensible Error, serve all the adjacent Places, even from Newfoundland to South-Carolina" (Plate 1, no. 1). In his list of court session dates he included from the beginning those of New York, New Jersey, and Maryland as well as Pennsylvania. The substitution of the page of New England courts appeared with the first of the Poor Richards Improved in 1748, and reappeared in 1749 and 1751; the addition of the list of Virginia courts came later, in 1754, 1755, and again in 1758.

The single greatest reason for the success of the Poor Richards was Franklin's ability to spice the prosaic matter of the ordinary almanac with more engaging commentary than his competitors could write, but certainly most helpful in promoting the large sales were the publicity the almanacs received in his widely circulated Pennsylvania Gazette and the willingness of a group of partners and friendly booksellers in colonies other than Pennsylvania to handle the Poor Richards and advertise them locally in their own newspapers.

The entries in the extant Franklin account books[6] are too incomplete for one to estimate the total number of almanacs printed each year for sale outside of the province; we do know, however, that in the 1730's he was sending annually from 200 to 500 copies to his partners Whitmarsh and later Timothy in Charleston, to his brother James in Newport, and to Fleet in Boston (FAB I, 36-37). Starting with the 1743 almanac Franklin appears to have increased greatly the size of his printings. Thomas Fleet ordered 300 Poor Richards (FAB II, 54-55). Parker in New York received 2000 copies (pp. 91-92); James's widow in Newport, 600 (pp. 55-56); and Mrs. Timothy her usual 300 (p. 121). Green in Annapolis increased his order in 1743 to 1500 copies and took a like number in 1744 (p. 64), the year Green's name was added to the imprint of the lot he had purchased. After 1748 when Franklin began publishing his Poor Richard Improved, the size of the printings remained steady. Hall in 1765 credited the partnership with an aggregate total of 141,257 copies for the fourteen years from 1752 to 1765,[7] an average slightly in excess of the "near ten thousand" annually which Franklin had set down as an estimate in his memoirs.

The information on the prices of the Franklin almanacs is even more fragmentary than that on the numbers printed. For the original Poor Richards we must rely almost entirely on the entries in the extant Franklin account books (FAB I and II), which list the number of copies sold but often omit the price charged as though Franklin kept the records of his almanac sales in a special ledger no longer preserved.

The retail price of an individual copy Franklin tells us by oblique reference in the 1737 almanac preface was "Fi' pence," and the cost per dozen, 3s.6d., according to the "Just Published" announcement of the first Poor Richard in the Gazette for December 28, 1732. This is the same price which Franklin charged for the Jerman (FAB II, 47),

Ball, or Birket by the dozen, and a half shilling cheaper than the almanacs of Leeds or Godfrey (FAB I, 37). The price of the Poor Richards in lots of 100 copies was understandably cheaper. To his favored Charleston partner Timothy in 1734, the cost was £1 per 100 (FAB I, 36), as it was likewise to Jonas Green of Annapolis in 1743 and 1744 (FAB II, 64), the years in which he bought 1500 copies; but normally the price per 100 was set at 1/5/0, a figure which held without change from 1732 to 1746 (FAB I, 37; II, 54, 63-64). The currency of Pennsylvania remained, in fact, remarkably stable during the entire twenty-five years of the publication of the Franklin almanacs and in the price of these publications, at least, reflected none of the inflationary pressures present in the currency of Massachusetts where the cost of the Ames almanacs, for instance, rose from 8d., or 6s. a dozen, in 1743 to 1s.6d., or 12s. a dozen, in 1749.[8]

What exactly Franklin charged for a single copy of his Poor Richard Improved I have not yet been able to discover, but the statement which he inserted on the titles of his almanacs for 1748 and 1749 leaves no doubt that the cost had increased: "Note, This Almanack us'd to contain but 24 Pages, and now has 36; yet the Price is very little advanc'd." The inference is clear. The prospective buyer will be getting in this improved almanac half again as much reading matter as he once received, but without the commensurate increase in cost. The price is, in fact, "very little advanc'd" over the five pence which he has been accustomed to paying.

Without the detailed evidence of any extant shop records to help fix the retail cost of an individual copy, one is obliged to work with several statements made by Parker in drawing up the balance sheet of the accounts of the firm of Franklin and Hall (AFH) early in 1766 on the occasion of the formal dissolution of the partnership. In entry four among the debits Hall charged Franklin 62/13/4 for 4000 Poor Richards Improved sent to his nephew in Newport over a ten-year period from 1752 to 1761. This which I take to be the most advantageous wholesale price at which the almanacs could be purchased amounts to 1/11/4 per 100, or about 3¾d. a copy. In entry forty-one on the credit side Parker has analyzed the "Account of Almanacks printed and sold by D. Hall from 1752 to 1765" and lists first the "Poor Richards— 141,257 &c.mmat; 4d (sticking deducted)." This figure of 4d., I assume, was Hall's average wholesale price for a single copy of the improved almanac

over a fourteen-year period, or 1/13/4 in lots of one hundred. To counterbalance those copies sold at 3¾d. a piece to Franklin and possibly to the occasional bookseller who made a purchase of several thousand almanacs in one order, Hall would need to sell other copies at a higher price. These were in all probability the Poor Richards he sold by the dozen at about 4½d. per copy to the many small shopkeepers in Philadelphia and the surrounding communities.

If one may reason then on the basis of comparative prices asked by Franklin in the sale of his original Poor Richards and in that of his Poor Richards Improved, the figures in tabulated form would fall like this:

Poor Richards

           

	Price per hundred			Price per copy
	£	s	d	d
Wholesale to partners	1	0	0	2⅖
Wholesale	1	5	0	3
Per dozen				3½
Per copy				5

Poor Richards Improved

         

	£	s	d	d
Wholesale to partners	1	11	4	3¾
Wholesale	1	13	4	4
Per dozen				4½[*]
Per copy				6[*]

And thus the retail price of six pence per copy seems the most reasonable one which Franklin might ask. It would afford him the same two-penny differential between the wholesale and retail prices which he had established for his earlier almanacs, and still fit the description of a sum "very little advanc'd" over five pence, the price which his readers had got used to paying for an original Poor Richard.

Plate No. 1

• 1. Title-page of the first printing of the Poor Richard for 1734 (Yale copy).
• 2. Title-page of the second "edition" of the Poor Richard for 1734 (American Philosophical Society copy).
• 3. Original salutation to preface of the first printing of PR 1734, A1v (Yale copy).
• 4. Amended salutation to preface of the first printing of PR 1734, A1v (second Yale copy).

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• 5. Opening portion of preface to the partially reset second printing of PR 1734, A1v (American Philosophical Society copy).

Plate No. 2

• 1. Title-page of the second printing of the PR 1736, A1 (American Philosophical Society copy).
• 2. First page of the reset preface to the unique second printing of the PR 1736, A1v (American Philosophical Society copy).
• 3. First page of the preface to the first printing of the PR 1736, A1v (New York Public copy).

Plate No. 3

• 1. Unproofed page of the PR 1738, B3v (Huntington copy).
• 2. Corrected page of the PR 1738, B3v (New York Public copy). Note in l. 17 "1 23" for "1 21"; in l. 25, "neat" for "near"; in l. 29, "end" for "eng"; in l. 33, "clouds" for "clounds"; and in l. 37, "1 15 mo" for "1 13 m."
• 3. Broken top rules on A3v, B4v, and C3v of one printing of the PR 1739 (American Philosophical Society copy).
• 4. Stop-press insertion of errata list on A2 of PR 1745 (New York Public copy; lacking in American Antiquarian Society copy).

Plate No. 4

• 1. Title-page of early printing of PR 1740 (American Philosophical Society copy). Note break in letter "d" of "Latitude" and in letter "y" of "Forty" present also on title-pages of PR 1736 (Plate 2, no. 1), and of PR 1744 (Plate 5, no. 1), indicative of the re-use of standing type.
• 2. Correct text on C4 of an early printing of PR 1740 (American Philosophical Society copy).
• 3. Unproofed text of later resetting of C4 in PR 1740 (Huntington copy).

Plate No. 5

• 1. Title-page of PR 1744 intended for sale in the Provinces of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey (Yale copy).
• 2. Title-page of PR 1744 with stop-press imprint alteration for the use of Jonas Green selling the almanac in the Province of Maryland (Huntington copy).
• 3. Digest of governors, speakers of the assembly, and Philadelphia mayors, a feature introduced into the first of the Poor Richards Improved, 1748, F1v, for the use of almanac readers in the Province of Pennsylvania (Yale copy).

Plate No. 6

• 1. Digest of New England court dates in first setting appearing in the PRI 1748, F1v, for the use of almanac readers in the provinces north of the Middle Colonies. It was a substitution for the Digest of governors, etc. See Plate 5, no. 3 (Boston Public copy).

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• 2. Digest of New England court dates in corrected setting inserted for almanac readers north of the Middle Colonies. It appears in the Boston Public copy of PRI 1749, F2, and in the Yale, Huntington, and New Jersey Historical Society copies of PRI 1751, F2v (Boston Public copy).
• 3. The B1 leaf in the first printing of the PRI 1749. Note that the signature is 1.5 mm. above bottom rule (Library of Congress copy).
• 4. The B1 leaf of the second printing of the PRI 1749. Note that the signature is 2.5 mm. above bottom rule (New York Public copy).
• 5. The C1 leaf of the first printing of the PRI 1749 (Library of Congress copy).
• 6. The C1 leaf of the second printing of the PRI 1749 (New York Public copy).

Plate No. 7

• 1. A portion of the first setting of the preface to the PRI 1749, A2v (Yale copy).
• 2. A portion of the second setting of the preface to the PRI 1749, A2v (New York Public copy).
• 3. Initial form of the digest of dates for the Courts of Assize in Maryland in the PRI 1749, F1v (Library of Congress copy).
• 4. Revised form of the digest of dates for the Maryland Courts in the second printing of the PRI 1749, F1v (New York Public copy).

Plate No. 8

• 1. Uncorrected historical note in first printing of PRI 1749, E2 (Library of Congress copy).
• 2. Corrected historical note in second printing of PRI 1749, E2 (Boston Public copy).
• 3. Pages D1v and D2 transposed in the PRI 1755 (Boston Public copy).

Notes