Young Ben’s schooling may have ended at age ten, but his education had only begun. The venue merely shifted from the classroom to his father’s small library or his brother’s print shop or under a tree by Mill Pond or in bed late at night when everyone else was asleep. The curriculum was international. Faculty included Daniel Defoe, John Locke, Plutarch, Xenophon, Pliny the Elder, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. The subjects were as rich and varied as those offered at any school, from mathematics and philosophy to the classics and French literature.
Franklin had the good fortune of being born into a bookish community. There was a library in Boston even before there was a Boston. In 1629, a year before the launch of the Arabella, the ship that carried the first Puritans from England to Salem, the fledgling Massachusetts Bay Company acquired a collection of some fifty volumes. They were mostly theological works, of course, but there were also grammar books and, for reasons unclear, an odd little volume called The French Country Farm. It is testament to the Puritans’ love of reading that on a ship with hardly a spare inch of cargo space, they made room for books. Once on dry land, Puritan leaders like Cotton Mather urged residents to use their free time wisely. “Be not fools, but redeem this time to your own advantage.… Give thyself unto reading.” Say what you like about the Puritans, they loved their books.
So did Ben Franklin. His long and useful life was intimately intertwined with books. He read them, wrote them, bought and sold them, borrowed and lent them, edited them, printed them, gifted them, collected them, loved them. In Philadelphia, at age twenty-five, he founded the first lending library in America. He read there for at least an hour or two each day, “and thus repair’d in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended for me.” By the time of his death in 1790, he had amassed a collection of 4,276 volumes, among the largest private libraries in the young United States.
It’s difficult to overestimate the importance of print at the time. Other than the spoken word, the printed page was the only medium for conveying information and writing the only form of communication. If you wanted to learn something, you either had to hear about it or read about it. You were what you read, and no one knew this better than Benjamin Franklin.
Years later, dining with friends in Paris, one of Franklin’s dinner companions, the Abbé de Raynal, asked those gathered a deceptively simple question: “What description of men most deserves pity?” One by one, they answered. When Franklin’s turn came, he replied, “A lonesome man [on] a rainy day, who does not know how to read.”
Books had—and still have—a magical quality. They are time machines, enabling us to leap across centuries. In Franklin’s time, they provided a means, the only means, really, for an ordinary tradesman, one of the “middling sort,” to gain entry to the upper echelons of society.
If it is possible for books to save a life, they saved Ben Franklin’s. They enabled young Ben, adrift in Puritan Boston, to connect with a larger world bursting with possibility. Franklin loved reading for the same reason he loved any activity: it was pleasurable and useful, and in more or less equal measure.
Franklin always had a “bookish inclination,” as he put it. He couldn’t remember a time when he could not read. He read the Bible at age five. Soon he was spending the little money he had on books. He became a vegetarian in part so he could save money to buy books.
He read anything and everything he could get his hands on. He started with his father’s collection of “polemic divinity,” but soon discovered he also owned a copy of Daniel Defoe’s An Essay upon Projects. The 1697 book, Defoe’s first, proposes clever and farsighted schemes for improving people’s lives: a network of local banks, a college for children of the working class, a pension fund for widows. In his preface, Defoe seems to be speaking to young Ben: “Books are useful only to such whose genius are suitable to the subject of them; and to dedicate a book of projects to a person who had never concerned himself to think that way would be like music to one that has no ear.” When it came to useful projects, Franklin had a virtuoso’s ear.
Later, working at his brother’s print shop and newspaper, Ben had access to what must have felt like the library of Alexandria: Pliny’s Natural History, Aristotle’s Politicks, George Sandys’s Travels, Shakespeare’s complete works as well as St. Augustine’s, Jonathan Swift’s A Tale of a Tub, Giovanni Marana’s Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy, and Thomas Tryon’s The Way to Health (the inspiration for Ben’s vegetarianism).
The first book young Ben purchased was John Bunyan’s hugely popular The Pilgrim’s Progress. I see why the story appealed to young Ben. The protagonist, Christian, is an everyman who thirsts for a larger life, one free of the “slough of despond,” and courageously journeys to find it.
More than the story, it was Bunyan’s writing style that grabbed Franklin: animated and conversational, lean. “Honest John,” as Franklin called Bunyan, was the first author he’d read who mixed narration and dialogue, engaging the reader “who in the most interesting parts finds himself as it were brought into the company and present at the discourse.”
Franklin cherished his copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress but was willing to part with it to afford other books. His library, like his life, was fluid, adapting to circumstances, always seeking the most expeditious course, the most useful path. Once he had juiced the usefulness from a book, he’d sell it or gift it to someone he thought might benefit.
Franklin soon traded Bunyan’s fictional pilgrim for tales of actual adventurers. These came in the form of chapbooks, compact and inexpensive volumes sold by wandering peddlers who traveled up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Written in a lively, accessible tone, chapbooks recounted tales of derring-do or shed light on what today we call “secret histories.” They had snappy, enticing titles like Unfortunate Court Favourites of England and Female Excellency, or The Ladies’ Glory: Worthy Lives and Memorable Actions of Nine Famous Women and The Surprising Miracles of Nature and Art.
Young Ben was looking for role models, and he found them in the chapbooks—up to a point. They proved too lightweight for him. He craved meatier fare, and you don’t get any meatier than Plutarch’s Lives. Written in the second century AD, the book traces the lives of notable Greeks and Romans. No ordinary history, it is less concerned with events than with lessons gleaned from these extraordinary lives. Plutarch’s aim, he said, was to make “the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life.”
I see why young Ben was drawn to the book. It portrays these men as models not only of heroism but of usefulness. They possessed traits anybody, even a “leather apron,” or working-class person, could emulate. Pericles of Athens, for instance, is described as a nimble leader, able to “change and shift with the greatest ease to what he himself shall judge desirable.” It is a lesson Franklin imbibed.
For Franklin, there was something furtive, almost subversive, about reading. Snuggled under the blankets late at night or at his brother’s print shop on a Sunday morning when everyone else was at church, he felt like a spy—or a rebel. Working in cahoots with bookshop apprentices, he surreptitiously borrowed books, taking great care to return them unmolested, as if they hadn’t been borrowed at all. For Franklin, reading was a conspiracy between author and reader, and he didn’t need anyone’s permission to take part.
Ben didn’t merely read books. He conversed with them. This conversation often unfolded in the margins, the place where reader and author meet. Franklin was an enthusiastic underliner, notetaker, and denizen of the margins. He read widely and wisely. He chose books plump with wisdom but also brought his own sagacity to the encounter. He read skeptically but with an open mind. A possibilian from a young age, he possessed the one personality trait most closely associated with creative genius: openness to experience. And for Franklin, reading was just that: an experience.
Franklin loved books and he loved the people who loved them. Describing his earliest friends, he says little about their occupations and instead simply notes that they were “all lovers of reading.” Books also opened doors for Franklin. The royal governor of New York met with young Ben simply because he heard he had an impressive collection of books.
Ben was generous with his books, lending them to friends who seldom returned them. Writing to his British friend Jonathan Shipley, he apologizes for not sending a certain book sooner, but it had gone missing. “I suppose I have lent it, and do not yet recollect to whom.” This happened often. He once ran an ad in his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, asking the person—whoever that might be—who had borrowed a book from him to please return it. Generosity comes at a price, one Ben Franklin happily paid.
Franklin was well read but rarely called attention to his erudition. He was no name-dropper. This was due in part to his anti-elitism, but I think there is another reason too. Support is most effective when it is invisible—the unseen beam reinforcing a building, the barely perceptible pause between notes, the deep yet invisible ocean of research that buoys an argument. True erudition doesn’t call attention to itself—or, as Franklin said, “He’s a fool that cannot conceal his wisdom.”
After a short walk through Boston’s Copley Square neighborhood, I arrive at my destination, a place that loves books as much as Franklin did. With its domed ceiling and religious iconography, the Boston Public Library feels less like a repository for books and more like a cathedral where you go to worship them. Our Lady of the Printed Word. I take the glass elevator to the third floor and the sanctum sanctorum: the Special Collections Department.
You don’t simply walk into the room. There are procedures to follow, rituals to perform. Only a few items are permitted inside: laptop, cell phone, reading glasses. No pens or notebooks or, heaven forbid, coffee. Before entering, I’m told to wash my hands, which I do with uncommon rigor. I feel like a doctor scrubbing before surgery.
I am buzzed into the clean room where a librarian directs me to my assigned seat, then gently places the book I’ve requested into a foam cradle. I am to turn the pages slowly, she explains, and hold them open not with my hands, scrubbed though they may be, but with string weights. These are exactly what they sound like: weighted strands less likely to damage a page than human hands, especially my beefy ones.
I feel eyes on me. Librarian eyes. I’m afraid to touch the book, worried I’ll make a mistake, fumble the weighted string maybe, and this precious volume that has survived more than three centuries will crumble in my hands and I will be banished, excommunicated, from the Special Collections Department for the rest of my days.
So for a long while I just look at the book. Brown and leather-bound, it is more compact than I expected. This is silly. It is just a book. I gently lift it. It is lighter than I expected. Slowly, using the weighted strings as instructed, I turn the pages. They feel sturdy and rough in my hands, with a satisfying heft. I turn to the title page. Set in a flowery typeface, it’s a real doozy: Bonifacius: An essay upon the good, that is to be devised and designed, by those who desire to answer the great end of life, and to do good while they live. Today it’s known simply as Essays to Do Good.
Franklin owned a copy, published in the same year as the one I’m holding: 1710. Franklin’s copy was secondhand and missing a few pages, but it moved him. Years later, he recalled how the book “gave me a turn of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life.” The author, the Reverend Cotton Mather, was not an obvious source of inspiration for Ben.
Mather was pure Puritan. He was involved, albeit indirectly, with the notorious Salem witch trials. He believed in demonic possession and exhorted his fellow citizens not to indulge in stage plays or games of chance. Yet he was no narrow-minded Puritan—not by a long shot. He wrote 450 books; was inducted into the Royal Society, the most prestigious scientific body of its day; and could write in seven languages. His library held some three thousand volumes and occupied the largest room in his large house on Boston’s Hanover Street. The collection included the expected theological works, but also books on geography, medicine, physics, astronomy, botany, political and military history, the classics (in Greek and Latin), as well as works on practical subjects like navigation and commerce. Mather was constantly expanding his library, begging and borrowing books shamelessly, just like Franklin.
Mather was especially well versed in the field of medicine and more knowledgeable than many of Boston’s physicians. He had a good bedside manner and was among the first to identify the link between emotions and illness. “Tranquility of mind will do wonderful things towards the relief of bodily maladies,” he wrote, advising doctors to converse with their patients to determine the source of their anxiety and find ways to relieve it. And when a smallpox epidemic descended on Boston in 1721, it was Cotton Mather, not the town’s medical establishment, who advocated for a new, and controversial, method of inoculation.
I never thought of the Puritans as great scientific thinkers, but many were. “No religion has ever been less hostile to science than Puritanism,” says historian Arthur Tourtellot. Of the nine colonial Americans elected to the Royal Society in the early eighteenth century, eight were Puritans. True, these preacher-scientists had very specific reasons for exploring and explaining the natural world—to appreciate God’s works and thus glorify him—but there is no denying their scientific and philosophical chops. At the time, reason and faith had not yet parted ways.
I open Mather’s three-hundred-year-old book with the same care my wife deploys in her daily contact lens ritual (“performing microsurgery,” I call it). I find the book surprisingly upbeat, and not only for a Puritan. Right up front, Cotton Mather makes his case. The world is a mess and in desperate need of people who do good—a statement that, sadly, applies equally today. Anticipating the 1960s, Mather says, in so many words, you are either part of the solution or part of the problem. “He is unworthy to be considered as a man, who is not for doing good among men.”
Mather portrays good deeds not as a burden but a privilege. “It is an invaluable honor to do good; it is an incomparable pleasure.” Mather, a man who never met an italic he didn’t like, succinctly connects good deeds and godliness. “A workless faith is a worthless faith.”
Doing good can be daunting, he concedes. Where to begin? Why not start with improving the lives of those closest to you: your family. As he writes in an unintentional pun: “One way to prove ourselves really good, is to be relatively good.”
I can imagine young Ben reading Mather by candlelight and getting fired up. Surely this sentence resonated: “Perhaps thou art one who makes but a little figure in the world, a brother of low degree.” And I can see young Ben, the son of a soap maker, nodding. Why yes, I am, Cotton. Tell me more. I can practically hear Mather’s thundering voice: “Behold, a vast encouragement!… It is possible the wisdom of a poor man may start a proposal that may save a city, serve a nation!”
A good book—and Mather’s is a good book—always stirred Ben Franklin’s fertile mind, no matter the author’s background or peccadillos. Ben cared more about what a book had to say than who wrote it. Sadly, this is not our way today. We read the author, not the book. Rather than interrogating a new and possibly life-changing idea, we interrogate the source instead and, more often than not, accept or reject it on that basis alone. In doing so, we forfeit much wisdom.
Whatever lingering animosity Franklin may have had toward Cotton Mather evaporated and, if anything, his fondness for the Puritan preacher grew with time. Years later, he fondly recalled one visit in particular to Mather’s North Boston home. On his way out, Franklin navigated a narrow staircase with a low ceiling. “Stoop!” Mather called to him. Ben, not reacting quickly enough, bonked his head on a beam. Mather, making a bigger point, added, “Let this be a caution to you not always to hold your head so high; stoop, young man, stoop—as you go through the world—and you’ll miss many hard thumps.” Franklin needed to check his pride, lest he get conked on the head. Stoop so you can rise. It is advice he followed, or tried to at least.
Years later, when Cotton Mather was long dead, Franklin wrote to the reverend’s son, Samuel, about the influence his father’s book had on him. “I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good, than on any other kind of reputation; and [if] I have been… a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book.”
I sense a shadow, a hovering presence. I look up and see the librarian. She is smiling, but she is not happy. She reprimands me, politely, quietly, for a biblio-transgression, something about improper page turning and failure to use the foam cradle correctly. I apologize, then decide not to push my luck. Better to leave the sanctum sanctorum voluntarily before I am evicted. I return Essays to Do Good to the librarian and wish it another three hundred years of health and intactness.
I ride the glass elevator to the lobby, exit onto Boylston Street and, looking up at the bright and hopeful sky, head east, toward the water.