Twenty-five years of calendars, weather, jokes - and the sharpest one-line life advice in American English.
Poor Richard, 1735. A secret told is a secret spent - the only version you fully control is the one you never say out loud.
From the 1736 Almanack. Hospitality has a shelf life: visit briefly, leave warmly, and never let your welcome wear out.
Poor Richard, 1737. Talk is cheap evidence; finished work is proof. Let results do the introducing.
From the very first Almanack, 1733. Company is contagious - you catch the habits, standards, and troubles of whoever you spend your time around.
Poor Richard, 1733. Food is fuel, not the main event - when appetite runs the schedule, the bill arrives as health, money, and energy.
A couplet from the 1750 Almanack. An unused ability helps nobody, including you - skill only pays when it is put where the light hits it.
The rest of this summary — and the one thing to do this week — is in the PDF.
Download the free PDFThis is not one book but a twenty-five-year run: the yearly almanack Franklin issued from late 1732, for the year 1733, through 1758. He wrote it as 'Richard Saunders' - Poor Richard, a penniless astrologer and philomath whose wife Bridget had nagged him into publishing to pay the bills. Each issue packed in the calendar, weather predictions, moon phases and tides, astronomy, poems, jokes, and recipes - and, tucked into the blank spaces between calendar days, one-line proverbs about how to live. Print runs reached about 10,000 copies a year, an enormous figure for the colonies, and in many homes it was the only secular book besides the Bible.
The character was a performance with a purpose. Franklin borrowed the name from an earlier English almanac-maker and modeled Poor Richard partly on Jonathan Swift's hoax astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff. The early issues ran a famous running gag: Poor Richard solemnly predicted the death of rival almanac-maker Titan Leeds on October 17, 1733, then insisted for years afterward that Leeds had indeed died and the man protesting was an impostor. It sold almanacks. But Franklin was candid about the real aim: in his Autobiography he says he treated the Almanack as a vehicle for conveying instruction among common people who bought few other books - entertainment as the delivery system for improvement.
