• Address: Chantilly, VA 20153 (map)
• Date Posted: 11/04/09

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is part of The 100 Greatest Books Ever Written series from Easton Press. The book, which is not available from the publisher as a stand-alone volume, is in near mint condition.
Easton Press volumes are among the most beautiful and durable books available today. Each volume is bound in genuine leather with a hubbed spine and accented with 22-karat gold, and printed on acid-neutral paper. The Smyth-sewn pages have gilded edges and are complemented by a sewn-in satin ribbon page marker and distinctive endleaves.
Born in Boston on January 17, 1706, Benjamin Franklin lived to the age of eighty-four. Yet this Autobiography – of which he wrote parts in 1771, 1783, and 1790 – covers only his first fifty-one years. Franklin did not live to complete his Autobiography nor to see its publication. In 1789 he made two copies of the original manuscript. One of these he sent to Benjamin Vaughan in England, the other to Louis Le Veillard in France. Five months later Franklin died and the matter of publishing his memoirs was left to the discretion of his grandson, William Temple Franklin.
The copy which had been sent to Vaughan has never been found. The copy which had been sent to Le Veillard was used as the text for the printed version published by William Temple Franklin in London in 1818. However, a French publisher had already printed a pirated version in Paris in 1791, the source of the text not being known. From the French version, a pirated English translation was published in England in 1793. Finally, in 1868, the United States Minister to France, John Bigelow, prepared an edition of the memoirs based on the manuscript he had obtained from the descendants of Le Veillard. Thus, there are four “first editions” of the text.
The original manuscript is now in the possession of the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California. In 1949 that institution collaborated with the University of California Press to issue a large quarto volume which printed, in four parallel columns, the four existing versions. It was then that the late editor Carl Van Doren proposed the publication of a book in which Franklin’s memoirs would be printed – in book form for the first time – directly from the original manuscript. The result was the edition being offered here.
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