The First American

by H. W. Brands

  Readers expected other expert information as well. For centuries astrologers had doubled as physicians, and vice versa—the real Richard Saunders being a recent example. Moreover, an age that swallowed the idea of witches hardly choked on a magical connection between the macrocosm of the stars and planets and the microcosm of the liver and bowels. Almanackers made the connection explicit; the “man of signs,” a woodcut or engraving identifying various organs with signs of the zodiac (the two arms with Gemini, the heart with Leo, the bowels with Virgo, and so on), was a standard feature of nearly every almanac. On a more practical plane, almanacs included recipes for poultices, emetics, and potions that ranged from the rankly superstitious to the semiscientific. What a later era would call psychological counseling was included as well; this completed a circle with the astrological element by identifying particular days as good for this activity or bad for that.

  Style, naturally, counted. Indeed, it counted for a great deal, since most of the substance of what went into almanacs was common knowledge—or common ignorance, as the case happened to be. The very familiarity of almanacs made them old friends to their readers; to tamper too much with the formula would disappoint—and damage sales. In consequence, such differentiation as took place between almanacs took place within relatively narrow constraints. What an almanacker said often mattered less than how he—or she, in a few cases (including that of James Franklin’s widow and Ben’s sister-in-law, Ann, who took over the printing business upon her husband’s death in 1735)—said it.

  In short, almanacs attempted to be all things to all people. One English almanacker summarized the craft:

  Wit, learning, order, elegance of phrase,

  Health, and the art to lengthen out our days

  Philosophy, physic and poesie,

  All this, and more, in this book to see.

  The best of the almanacs succeeded famously. Sales figures are elusive, but such as survive indicate that in England in the 1660s, total sales averaged about 400,000 annually. Even after the government, remarking the plumpness of this goose, levied a fat tax, sales topped 450,000 a century later. In America, almanac publications outstripped those of all other books combined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most popular of the American almanacs, produced by Nathaniel Ames, sold between 50,000 and 60,000 per year. A man could get rich by almanacs.

  Franklin intended to do just that. He had already been in the business of publishing almanacs, starting with Thomas Godfrey’s Pennsylvania Almanack in 1729 (for 1730) followed by John Jerman’s American Almanack the next year. Either Jerman was hard to please or he liked to keep his printers off balance; he had been with Andrew Bradford before coming to Franklin, and he returned to Bradford in 1732. Godfrey too abandoned Franklin for Bradford that year, perhaps for economic reasons, perhaps as part of the general falling-out between his family and Franklin. Whatever the reasons, Franklin found himself staring at the final months of 1732—prime almanac season—with nothing to offer his customers.

  So he decided to write his own. He stole the name of Richard Saunders from the deceased astrologer-doctor. He borrowed—apparently without asking—and adapted the title of an almanac his brother James was publishing at Newport: Poor Robin’s Almanack (itself appropriated from a seventeenth-century almanac published under the same title in London). His format followed any number of other almanacs. His facts were public property or easily deducible therefrom.

  What was peculiarly Franklin about Poor Richard was the pushy manner in which he marketed it and the distinctive voice in which its author spoke. “Just Published for 1733,” declared the Gazette on December 28, 1732:

  Poor Richard: An Almanack containing the Lunations, Eclipses, Planets’ Motions and Aspects, Weather, Sun and Moon’s Rising and Setting, High Water, &c., besides many pleasant and witty Verses, Jests and Sayings, Author’s Motive of Writing, Prediction of the Death of his friend Mr. Titan Leeds, Moon no Cuckold, Batchelor’s Folly, Parson’s Wine and Baker’s Pudding, Short Visits, Kings and Bears, New Fashions, Game for Kisses, Katherine’s Love, Different Sentiments, Signs of a Tempest, Death a Fisherman, Conjugal Debate, Men and Melons, H. the Prodigal, Breakfast in Bed, Oyster Lawsuit &c.

  Gazette readers intrigued enough to buy the bound version (priced at three shillings sixpence per dozen, obviously intended for resale) or the broadsheet edition (two shillings sixpence the dozen) were introduced to Richard Saunders, Philomath—a standard honorific for almanac-makers—by Saunders himself. “Courteous Reader, I might in this place attempt to gain thy favour by declaring that I write almanacks with no other view than the public good; but in this I should not be sincere, and men are nowadays too wise to be deceived by pretenses how specious soever.” Like the printer Franklin apologizing for the advertisement that gave offense to certain customers, Saunders confessed to monetary motives. “The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud. She cannot bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow while I do nothing but gaze at the stars, and has threatened to burn all my books and rattling-traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family. The printer has offered me some considerable share of the profits, and I have thus begun to comply with my Dame’s desire.”

  Twenty-five years earlier Jonathan Swift, writing as Isaac Bickerstaff, had drawn attention to his own almanac by solemnly predicting the death of his rival John Partridge. Lampooning those who took astrological predictions seriously, Swift supplied the precise day and hour of Partridge’s demise: 11 P.M. on March 29, 1708. The dread day arrived, and was followed shortly by printed accounts, written in a style suspiciously Swiftian, of Partridge’s passing. Partridge, outraged, protested that he remained very much alive. Swift dismissed the protests as a hoax perpetrated by persons intent on deceiving the public.

  Franklin knew of the Swift stratagem—and knew that most readers in America did not. So he had Richard Saunders declare that the only reason he was commencing publication of his almanac just now—he had long been excessive poor and his wife excessive proud—was that his good friend and fellow student of the stars, Mr. Titan Leeds, was about to expire. Mr. Leeds (really) published an almanac of his own each year, and Saunders said he had not wished to injure him in any regard. “But this obstacle (I am far from speaking it with pleasure) is soon to be removed, since inexorable death, who was never known to respect merit, has already prepared the mortal dart, the fatal sifter has already extended her destroying shears, and that ingenious man must soon be taken from us.”

  Typically, Franklin twisted the template he employed; he injected an element of competition into his forecast of impending doom. As colleagues in the astrologic art, Saunders said, both he and Mr. Leeds had cast the latter’s horoscope. By Saunders’s calculation, death would come for Leeds at 3:29 P.M. on October 17, 1733. By Leeds’s calculation (Saunders said), it would tarry till the 26th of the same month. “This small difference between us we have disputed whenever we have met these 9 years past…. Which of us is most exact, a little time will now determine.” Yet whether Leeds’s days were the few more or the few less, they were, by Saunders’s reckoning, irretrievably delimited. “As therefore these provinces may not longer expect to see any of his performances after this year, I think myself free to take up the task, and request a share of the public encouragement.” The reader—purchaser, rather—who provided such encouragement might consider himself “not only as purchasing an useful utensil but as performing an act of charity to his poor friend and servant, R. Saunders.”

  A principal advantage of being one’s own printer lay in the opportunity to wait till the last moment to put thought to type; Franklin waited for Titan Leeds to publish his response, in his own almanac for 1734, before taking his hoax to the next step. Leeds upbraided Franklin for Saunders’s “false prediction,” noting for the benefit of his readers that “I have by the mercy of God lived to write a Diary
for the year 1734, and to publish the folly and ignorance of this presumptuous author.” Leeds was especially incensed at Franklin’s “gross falsehood” in asserting that he—Leeds—had had the temerity to forecast his own death. “I do not pretend to that knowledge, although he has usurped the knowledge of the Almighty herein, and manifested himself a fool and a liar.” Carefully dating and timing his authorship of this preface as precisely 3:33 P.M. on October 18, 1733, safely past Saunders’s alleged hour of doom, Leeds reminded readers that he had been providing almanacs for many years before Franklin ever appeared, and concluded, “So perhaps I may live to write when his performances are dead.”

  By responding so, Leeds delivered himself into Franklin’s hands. Saunders rejoined, in the preface to Poor Richard for 1734, that although an illness in his own family had prevented him from being present at Mr. Leeds’s mortal moment—“to receive his last embrace, to close his eyes, and do the duty of a friend in performing the last offices to the departed”—the woeful event must indeed have occurred.

  There is the strongest probability that my dear friend is no more, for there appears in his name, as I am assured, an almanack for the year 1734, in which I am treated in a very gross and unhandsome manner, in which I am called a false predicter, an ignorant, a conceited scribbler, a fool, and a liar. Mr. Leeds was too well bred to use any man so indecently and so scurrilously, and moreover his esteem and affection for me was extraordinary. So that it is to be feared that pamphlet may be only a contrivance of somebody or other, who hopes perhaps to sell two or three years’ almanacks still, by the sole force and virtue of Mr. Leeds’s name.

  Notwithstanding his distress at this unfortunate turn of events, Saunders explained to readers that his life on the whole was much improved from the previous year:

  Your kind and charitable assistance last year, in purchasing so large an impression of my almanacks, has made my circumstances much more easy in the world, and requires my grateful acknowledgment. My wife has been enabled to get a pot of her own, and is no longer obliged to borrow one from a neighbor, nor have we ever since been without something of our own to put in it. She has also got a pair of shoes, two new shifts, and a new warm petticoat; and for my part, I have bought a second-hand coat, so good that I am now not ashamed to go to town or be seen there. These things have rendered her temper so much more pacific than it used to be, that I may say I have slept more, and more quietly within this last year, than in the three foregoing years put together. Accept my hearty thanks therefor, and my sincere wishes for your health and prosperity.

  Leeds learned only a little from his first encounter with Franklin. He congratulated Saunders for his good fortune and that of his wife; yet he could not help asking, for the sake of his readers, “If falsehood and ingenuity be so rewarded, what may he expect if he ever be in a capacity to publish that that is either just or according to art?” Leeds then attempted to brush away this pesky fly: “I shall say little more about him than, as a friend, to advise he will never take upon him to predict or ascribe any person’s death till he has learned to do it better than he did before.”

  Franklin refused to let Leeds off so easily. “Whatever may be the music of the spheres, how great soever the harmony of the stars, ’tis certain there is no harmony among the stargazers; but they are perpetually growling and snarling at one another like strange curs, or like some men at their wives.” Of course, it was Franklin who had upset the harmony of the stargazers by trying to break into the almanac market, yet the device of Saunders allowed him to massage the truth with impunity and imagination:

  I had resolved to keep the peace on my own part, and affront none of them; and I shall persist in that resolution. But having received much abuse from Titan Leeds deceased (Titan Leeds when living would not have used me so!) I say, having received much abuse from the Ghost of Titan Leeds, who pretends to be still living, and to write almanacks in spite of me and my predictions, I cannot help saying, that though I take it patiently, I take it very unkindly.

  And whatever he may pretend, ’tis undoubtedly true that he is really defunct and dead. First because the stars are seldom disappointed, never but in the case of wise men, sapiens dominabitur astris, and they foreshowed his death at the time I predicted it. Secondly, ’Twas requisite and necessary he should die punctually at that time, for the honour of astrology, the art professed both by him and his father before him. Thirdly, ’tis plain to everyone that reads his last two almanacks (for 1734 and 35) that they are not written with that life his performances used to be written with: the wit is low and flat, the little hints dull and spiritless, nothing smart in them but Hudibras’s verses against astrology at the heads of the months in the last, which no astrologer but a dead one would have inserted; and no man living would or could write such stuff as the rest.

  Franklin—Saunders, rather—then employed, or misemployed, the words of Leeds himself to deliver the coup de grâce:

  In his preface to his almanack for 1734, he says, “Saunders adds another gross falsehood in his almanack, viz., that by my own calculation I shall survive until the 26th of the said month October 1733, which is as untrue as the former.” Now if it be, as Leeds says, untrue and a gross falsehood that he survived till the 26th of October 1733, then it is certainly true that he died before that time. And if he died before that time, he is dead now, to all intents and purposes, anything he may say to the contrary notwithstanding.

  Franklin milked the ploy shamelessly. In the preface to Poor Richard 1736 he registered his utter indignation that persons envious of his ability to forecast a man’s death should try to steal his reputation by asserting that he—Richard Saunders, Philomath—did not exist. “If there were no such man as I am, how is it possible I should appear publicly to hundreds of people, as I have done for several years past, in print?” Saunders said he would not have deigned to notice these slanders but for the sake of his printer, “to whom my enemies are pleased to ascribe my productions, and who it seems is as unwilling to father my offspring as I am to lose the credit of it.”

  When Titan Leeds really did die, Franklin refused to let him rest in peace. Speaking of Leeds’s publishers, Saunders reminded his readers how for several years the Bradfords (William Bradford printed a New York edition to complement Andrew’s Philadelphia version) had refused to admit that Leeds was dead. “At length when the truth could no longer be concealed from the world, they confess his death in their Almanack for 1739, but pretend that he died not till last year, and that before his departure he had furnished them with calculations for 7 years to come. Ah, My Friends, these are poor shifts and thin disguises.” As it happened, Saunders said, just three days earlier Titan Leeds himself had communicated in writing with him from that place where all philomaths must go sooner or later. In this letter, which Saunders helpfully included with his preface, so that readers might know the truth, Leeds reported that Saunders’s original prediction had been accurate—“with a variation only of 5 min. 53 sec. which must be allowed to be no great matter in such cases.”

  As was apparent to the least attentive reader, Franklin thoroughly enjoyed adopting the guise of Richard Saunders. Where Franklin the businessman had to be circumspect, careful not to offend, Saunders the almanacker could be outrageous—indeed, the more outrageous the better. Franklin as Franklin often had to hide his gifts to avoid inspiring envy; Franklin as Saunders could flaunt his wit, erudition, and general brilliance. In time—as his position in the community grew more secure—Franklin would no longer require Richard Saunders; till then the alter ego helped keep him sane.

  Readers enjoyed Poor Richard as much as Franklin did. Copies went out the door by the single and the gross. In one year John Peter Zenger of New York (lately the defendant in a celebrated libel trial) took eighteen dozen in a batch, then another sixteen dozen. Louis Timothée (who now generally went by Lewis Timothy) in South Carolina ordered twenty-five dozen; Thomas Fleet in Boston also took twenty-five dozen. James Franklin’s widow, Ann, in Newport
bought one thousand. These numbers hardly made Poor Richard the bestselling almanac in America; where Poor Richard sold an average of about ten thousand per year, Nathaniel Ames’s Astronomical Diary sold five to six times as many. But Poor Richard had a unique persona, and it developed a loyal readership.

  While readers may have come for the quarrels Franklin provoked, they stayed for the advice he dispensed—and the way he dispensed it. Every almanac offered pearls of wisdom on personal conduct and related matters of daily life; that the pearls had been retrieved from other oysters bothered no one except perhaps the owners of those other oysters, who in any event had no recourse in the absence of applicable copyright law. The trick for writers like Franklin was to polish the pearls and set them distinctively; in this he had no peer. What came to be called “the sayings of Poor Richard” first surfaced as filler on the calendar pages of the almanac; the limitations of space, together with Franklin’s inherent economy, taught him to distill each message to its morsel. “Great talkers, little doers” broke no philosophical ground, but for pith it trumped nearly every alternative. “Hunger never saw bad bread”; “Light purse, heavy heart”; “Industry need not wish”; and “Gifts burst rocks” fell into the same category.

  Sometimes succinctness yielded—slightly—to sauciness. “Neither a fortress nor a maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley.” “Marry your son when you will but your daughter when you can.” “Tell a miser he’s rich, and a woman she’s old, you’ll get no money of one nor kindness of t’other.” “Prythee isn’t Miss Cloe’s a comical case?/She lends out her tail, and she borrows her face.” “The greatest monarch on the proudest throne is obliged to sit upon his own arse.” “Force shits upon reason’s back.”