Printed Page Bookshop

Named one of the top three best bookstores in Denver

Ben Franklin, bookslinger

By

Pretty much every American with any education knows that Benjamin Franklin was a scientist, an inventor, a diplomat, a father of our country, and the model for $100 bills.  But far fewer know that he was the first American to print a novel.  (Of course, he began his career as a printer, and he even printed money, though not with his image on it.)  The novel was titled “Pamela,” written by Samual Richardson, It was long and expensive to produce — factory-made paper hadn’t come along yet — and Franklin printed it in 1742.  Mostly, colonists didn’t want to read novels, and it would be decades before another unabridged novel was printed in America. The printing product Franklin is most remembered for is his flimsy, transient almanacs.  
But as Evan Friss wrote in “The Bookshop,” “Franklin was also a bookseller — and one of the first, if not the first in colonial America.  He sold schoolbooks, religious texts and books and pamphlets on a wide range of subjects to colonial outposts near and far from his home in Philadelphia.  He was a shopkeeper who sold books; he didn’t have a ‘bookstore’ — the word ‘bookstore’ didn’t yet exist.  
“While Franklin is most famous for his roles as a statesman, diplomat, and inventor, his experience in the book trade was a formative one.  For the rest of his life, he self-identfied as a printer.  He understood that we are what we read  And that what we read is dictated by what authors choose to write, what publishers choose to publish, what printers choose to print, and what, where, and how booksellers choose to sell.
“Franklin lived for the better part of the eighteenth century.  Over the course of his life, colonists became more literate, more cultured, and, ultimately, more American.  Books were partly responsible.  So was Benjamin Franklin.”