Benjamin Franklin Bache (journalist) - Printing Career

Printing Career

After a few years at Le Coeur’s, Franklin began having Bache trained for a career as a printer-publisher, as he had been. In the early months at Geneva, the youth was under the care of Philibert Cramer. At the age of 13, he was also learning the classics: he was already interpreting Telemachus, Terence, Sallust, the orations against Catiline by Cicero, Lucian, and the New Testament in Greek. In 1781, Bache wrote in his diary about the extensive school work which demanded much of his time.

Upon returning to Philadelphia, Bache began working as a printer at his grandfather's shop at the family’s Franklin Court property on Market Street, presaging his future career as a newspaper editor. Bache had learned type-founding as an apprentice in Paris to Francois-Ambrose Didot, the first printer to print on vellum paper. He considered Didot to be the “best printer that now exists and maybe that has ever existed.” After living abroad for so long, he felt that Philadelphia seemed foreign.

As his grandfather was starting to fade, Bache oversaw the print shop’s operations, but under the older man's watchful eye. His first print job was "An Ode in Imitation of Alcaeus," a poem by the linguistic scholar William Jones, who decried England’s corruption and the misuse of monarchical power. Bache’s first ventures in commercial publishing were school texts, including Isaiah Thomas’ collection of writings by Aesop and Erasmus.

His early ventures also included reprinting a series of four Lessons for Children books by Anna Letitia Barbauld, an English woman. She used a Lockean approach of applying behavioral techniques of esteem and disgrace to instill wisdom and virtue. Her works taught children not to cry, mistreat animals, or be idle. In one story, three boys at a boarding school receive cakes from home. Harry greedily eats his cake and becomes sick. Peter hoards his cake until it becomes stale. Billy shares his cake with the other students and eventually with an old blind man. The act of being unselfish made the boy “more glad than if he had eaten ten cakes.”