For Ben Franklin’s Birthday, His First Piece of Printing Reappears

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/16/books/ben-franklin-311th-birthday-first-printing-at-university-of-pennsylvania.html

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Before he was the familiar bald and bespectacled founding father, Benjamin Franklin was a 17-year-old neophyte printer with burning ambition and something of a punk-rock visual sensibility.

Or so it seems from the very first piece of his printing, which will go on view at the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday — Franklin’s 311th birthday — after having been out of sight for nearly 200 years.

Penn Libraries recently acquired the only known surviving copy of a 1723 Franklin broadside, showing an elegy for a Philadelphia poet and printer named Aquila Rose, and topped with a bold skull and crossbones motif. The broadside, created when Franklin was 17, first surfaced in the 1820s, amid a wave of antiquarian interest in America’s founding generation, but then disappeared from view, until a dealer recently discovered it pasted inside a scrapbook.

When Franklin printed the broadside, he had broken the terms of his indenture in Boston and run away to Philadelphia. It was important enough to him that he vividly recalled it, and the “old shatter’d press” he used to create it, more than four decades later in his autobiography.

Mitch Fraas, the curator of special collections at the library, said, “It has a visual appeal from a mile away that makes you take note of it,” noting that the woodcut style was unusual in Philadelphia at the time.

“I like to think of it as a bit of showmanship,” he added.

The broadside, one of about 900 examples of Franklin’s printing known to survive, may be the big find. But the scrapbook in which it was pasted, created by the 19th-century antiquarian Samuel Hazard, also includes other striking images, like a woodcut from a 1780 German almanac showing the traitorous Benedict Arnold being paraded through the streets in effigy, which is pasted opposite a 1798 engraving of members of Congress attacking one another with sticks and hot pokers.

“It’s sort of a visual history of Philadelphia,” Mr. Fraas said of the scrapbook, which will be on view at the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center until Feb. 10 along with the broadside. “It’s really quite remarkable.”