“Poor Richard’s Almanac” appeared every year thereafter, for twenty-five years, the annual sale averaging 10,000 copies a year, far in excess of any other Colonial publication. “Poor Richard” is now a “classic”; even those that have not read it have heard of it. Moreover, many people quote the homely proverbs without knowing it; for Poor Richard’s wisdom became part and parcel of our English speech long ago. Sometimes it has been published as “Father Abraham’s Speech,” and “The Way to Wealth,” and it has been translated into every modern language.
Besides his newspaper and almanac printing, Franklin printed books. He brought out the first novel ever published in America—Richardson’s “Pamela” (1744). Franklin’s tremendous industry and his general thrift made him successful enough to retire at the age of forty-two. Then came a brief interval, before his political career began in earnest, during which he lived “more like a man of taste and a scholar accustomed to cultured surroundings than a self-made man who had battled for years with the material world.”
The year 1748, though marking the end of Franklin’s career as active printer, did not terminate his interest in the setting of type and issuing his writings from his own press. Even in Passy, when in the midst of his busy diplomatic duties, he had a printing-press of his own from which he issued those “bagatelles” that so charmed the French ladies of his acquaintance.
Cleverly the printer speaks in the famous epitaph:
The Body
of
Benjamin Franklin
Printer
(Like the cover of an old book
Its contents torn out