Locating Franklin’s Print Shops

One nice result of the celebrations of October 6, 2023 in Philadelphia was that Roy Goodman put me in touch with Richard Armandi, a long-time Franklinian who is particularly interested in the original locations of Franklin’s printing businesses. The suggestion from Franklin Court is that all of Franklin’s business was housed on that property, which …

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Benjamin Franklin’s Last Bet

This book would be fine as a first book on Franklin, because the author starts from not knowing much about him, and touches meaningfully on every fundamental facet of Franklin that I can think of. He goes on to cover his topic very well. Most Franklin fans are not particularly interested in what happened to …

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The Young Benjamin Franklin

From my Goodreads review of Nick Bunker’s wonderful book: Without question, my Book of the Year, so far. One of the best books on Franklin, this takes many episodes one reads right past in his Autobiography (and standard biographies) and goes deeper.The definition of “young” is generous: Franklin is forty years old before this author …

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Somersett

I’m cross-posting my review in GoodReads here of Phillip Goodrich‘s 2019 book, Somersett – Or Why and How Benjamin Franklin Orchestrated The American Revolution. It’s a darn good story, with a lot of lively historical matters presented, but unreliable while asking us to believe all of it. The author spins an engaging tale of a …

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