Why does London’s oldest parish church, St Bartholomew the Great, founded in Smithfield in 1123, have an ancient printing press set up in the Lady Chapel? It is because 300 years ago the young Benjamin Franklin started work there as a journeyman printer with Samuel Palmer, and over the next month you can book in to see demonstrations of what that work was like.
I looked in to the church yesterday, found a demonstration under way, and a knowledgable guide in Tim Bryars, a member of the congregation.
Tim, who is an antiquarian bookseller, tells the story in a guest post for London Historians, and the video I shot. Tim has written:
“Remembered as an inventor, diplomat and a Founding Father of the USA, Benjamin Franklin always described himself as a printer. As a boy he ran away from his apprenticeship with his brother James in Boston, which caused a serious family rift, and he worked for another printer in Philadelphia. By the time he was 18 he had tired of working for the eccentric Samuel Keimer, on a beaten-up press with worn-out type. He thought he had secured a powerful patron in the person of Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith, although Keith’s letters of recommendation turned out to be worthless. Without money or influential friends he crossed the Atlantic to learn from the leading printers in London, which was the centre of the print trade in the English-speaking world. He arrived on Christmas Eve 1724.
“Which is where we come in. The ancient Lady Chapel of St Bartholomew the Great is one of two places in the country where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared, but it had been separated from the rest of the church at the Reformation, and in 1725 it housed the printing shop of respected master printer Samuel Palmer, who gave Franklin his first job in London”.
In this further video Tim explains that the original press is in the Smithsonian Museum, Washington, but Reading University has loaned the only replica in existence. Peter Lawrence demonstrates.
There’s more in Tim’s blog post about the printing demonstrations, Franklin’s time as a printer, and his return to London in later years. As well as the demonstrations, there are lectures and plans for a plaque celebrating Franklin’s time in the Lady Chapel, funded by two friends from the US and UK.
I’m currently experimenting with various artificial intelligence apps, and asked Perplexity to to find out everything it could about Franklin’s time as a printer in London, and then to create an article.
Benjamin Franklin’s London Printing Career by Perplexity is here, and I think it is rather impressive. I’ve added a disclaimer to the effect that it is AI generated, but I suspect lots of content that we’ll see in future may not be so clearly labelled. I’ll continue experimenting and report further later.