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[E. Herbert Clapp, 7 School St., Boston, 1879]. Engraving, 18” x 23”; sheet size 24” x 30”. CONDITION: Very good, light marginal soiling, paper pulp repairs to verso along tear at top of plate mark, as well as to vertical tear at center of lower margin. Imprint mostly effaced below print.

An engraving illustrating the maxims of Benjamin Franklin’s “Poor Richard,” published in Boston nearly a century after Franklin’s death and testifying to the enduring popularity of his almanac.

Surrounding a portrait of “The First American” himself, with his name and the places and dates of his birth and death, are twenty-four charming line and stipple vignettes, each bordered by adages from Franklin’s Way to Wealth (a compendium of Poor Richard sayings). A slovenly farmyard scene, with a cow kicking over an unattended pail, drinkers squandering the workday, and a sack of grain spilling from an unmended hole, illustrates that “He who saves not as he gets, may keep his nose all his life to the grindstone, and die not worth a groat”; “A fat kitchen makes a lean will”; and “Would you die rich think of saving.” Finely dressed ladies and gentleman in an auction house represent the cautions “Buy what thou hast no need of, and ere long thou wilt sell thy necessaries” and “At a great pennyworth pause awhile, many are ruined by buying bargains.” Together, a well-heeled man holding a “Bond” and his disheveled, presumably insolvent counterpart remind us that “Lying rides upon debts back, it is hard for an empty bag to stand upright” and “Creditors have better memories than debtors.” Other maxims include: “The eye of the master will do more work than both his hands”; “What maintains one vice would bring up two children”; “If you would know the value of money, try to borrow some”; and, of course, “Early to be and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Franklin wrote in his autobiography that “In 1732 I first published my Almanack under the Name of Richard Saunders; it was continu’d by me about 25 Years, commonly call’d Poor Richard’s Almanack. I endeavour’d to make it both entertaining and useful, and it accordingly came to be in such Demand that I reaped considerable Profit from it, vending annually near ten Thousand” (“Poor Richard”). 

Oliver Pelton (1798/99–1882) was born in Portland, Connecticut, and began his career as an apprentice—and later a partner—to Abner Reed, one of the first American banknote engravers. By 1827 he was working as an engraver in Boston, where, between 1836 and 1837 he became a partner in the banknote engraving firm of Pelton and Terry. By the 1850s he had begun engraving portraits of prominent Americans, and his engraving of George Washington, after the Gilbert Stuart “Lansdowne portrait,” hung in President Lincoln’s Springfield home during his presidency. Pelton spent the latter decades of his career in Newton, Massachusetts and East Hartford, Connecticut.

Pelton’s print is based on Bowles’s Moral Pictures, or Poor Richard Illustrated, which, engraved by Robert Dighton and published by Carington Bowles, first appeared in London in about 1795, not many years after Franklin’s death. Though mostly effaced, the imprint on this print is nevertheless legible as “Published by E. Herbert Clapp, 7 School St. Boston.” Clapp’s edition was advertised in the Boston Evening Transcript in November of 1879, with the following praise: “It is one of those things by which the eye instantly conveys to the mind lessons of great practical wisdom. The engraving is in a most interesting old style of the art, in happy keeping with the proverbs.” We locate an earlier Boston edition of Pelton’s version, published in 1859 by Allen and Holland, and later ones, published by Nathaniel W. Appleton in 1881 and by T.O.H.P. Burnham in 1887.

OCLC records just two holdings of Clapp’s edition, at Beinecke and the Massachusetts Historical Society Library.

REFERENCES: “Poor Richard Illustrated” at Library of Congress online; “Poor Richard, Illustrated,” Boston Evening Transcript, November 15, 1879, p. 8.

Item #6802

Price: $1,500.00