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Benjamin Franklin's Printing Network: Disseminating Virtue in Early America. By Ralph Frasca. (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2006. Pp. ix, 295. Cloth, $44.95.)
Four hefty new biographies of Benjamin Franklin have found their way onto bookstore shelves in the past five years, tempting one to wonder if there is still a stone left unturned when it comes to scholarship on Franklin. Here is where Ralph Frasca's book surprises and delights. Frasca takes us into a part of Franklin's world that has been often studied, his world of print, but not with an eye to the ways in which Franklin operated within a complex network of printers to pursue his quests for personal success and the dissemination of virtue.
Frasca offers an extensive study of Franklin's community of print-a varied collection of printers he helped finance and sponsor-paying particular attention to how this "Franklin network" provides a more informed and nuanced understanding of American eighteenth-century print culture (2). Frasca's book is an extended treatment of this network, which "lasted from the 1720s to the 1790s" and "stretched from New England to the West Indies, and comprised more than two dozen printers" (19).
By looking at the printers not only as individuals but also as a complex and integrated community, Frasca argues that one can obtain a better understanding of the period's printing economics along with its editorial practices and how those practices influenced emerging notions of the freedom of the press. Frasca argues that underlying the lessons one learns about print economics, editorial decisions, and press freedom from the Franklin network is a rich substratum of information...