| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 131.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Benjamin Franklin's Printing Network: Disseminating Virtue in Early America. By Ralph Frasca. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006. ix, 295 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $44.95.)
Ralph Frasca's monograph joins many works that seek the meaning of Benjamin Franklin in his first vocation, as a printer. It is the first to focus on Franklin's network of printing establishments: the series of printers, many of them former apprentices, with whom he formed partnerships, from Newport to Antigua. It follows upon his April 1990 PMHB article, in which the author argued for the general success and benevolence of Franklin's partnerships as his protégés moved, as he put it in that article's title, "from apprentice to journeyman to partner."	1
Frasca has read his newspapers, Franklin's papers, and an impressive scattering of manuscript sources. He argues that Franklin intended his press to spread virtue and quotes Franklin's many comments to that effect. But in making the dissemination of virtue the central motive of Franklin's network, Frasca simplifies the complications printers faced and cannot go beyond earlier interpretations that take Franklin's words at face value.	. . .

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