On Tuesday, our favorite balding founding father and 100 dollar bill dude, Ben Franklin turned 311. That’s quite an age, Mr. Franklin, yowza! But before he was a founding father, Franklin was a printer. It turns out his first piece of printing is now on display at the University of Pennsylvania to celebrate his birthday.
The New York Times writes:
“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.”
The print is from 1723 and will be on display with the scrapbook, where it was found.
Images courtesy of The New York Times and https://bit.ly/2k57Lah