Poor ROBIN
James Franklin strove to make his almanac entertaining, and he did not refrain from injecting anticlerical gibes or a bit of ribaldry. He obviously relished such pithy sayings as "More religion than honesty" and "If you cannot bite, never show your Teeth."
The Library of Congress purchased its unique copy for $35 at the Brinley sale of 1879. It then had seven leaves and seemed to lack an eighth leaf at the end. Much later, George Winship, librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, reported a curious happening in an article that he contributed to The Providence Sunday Journal, November 19, 1911:
A few weeks ago some one noticed that a leaf which was bound at the end of a book in the Boston Public Library had nothing whatever to do with that book. It was apparently a leaf of an old almanac, and after some research Alfred B. Page of the Massachusetts Historical Society Library was successful in identifying it, not only as the last leaf of the almanac for 1728, which was printed in Newport toward the end of the preceding year, but as the identical leaf which originally formed a part of the copy now belonging to the Library of Congress.
The officials in Washington sent their book to Boston to make certain of the identification, and in return they have been presented with the missing member, so long separated from its proper body. On its way back to Washington, this precious little waif is making a visit to the State of its origin, and will be for a few days on exhibition at the John Carter Brown Library, in company with various of its contemporary rivals, predecessors and followers.
A reprint of the almanac with an introduction by Mr. Winship, signing himself as Philohistoricus, was published at this time. And while at Boston the copy was encased in a variegated morocco binding by the Hathaway Book Binding Company on Beacon Street.
[20] See Rhode Island History, vol. 12 (1953), p. 33-43, 105-109.