The career of Richard Francklin (c.1696–1765) – bookseller, publisher and printer – spanned a crucial period in the history of the eighteenth-century book. Born soon after the lapse of the Licensing Act (1695), he died soon after the furore over the North Briton (1764). Examining Francklin’s mix of business activities, this study considers Francklin’s career as a representative example of early to mid-Georgian stationers.

The shop

The Stationers’ Company Registers do not show Francklin’s name among the listed apprentices and, indeed, only record one apprentice of Curl’s, a ‘Thomas Dyer’ or ‘Dryer’ turned over to Curll in 1711 and freed in 1713; nonetheless Ralph Straus claimed Francklin was Edmund Curll’s ‘own apprentice’. From 1750, Francklin was a London ‘Citizen and Cordwainer’, freed of that company. Certainly he was working for Curll by September 1717, when he produced a ‘true Copy’ for Curll and authenticated it with the words, ‘Witness my Hand’. His name first appeared on a title page in 1718. Francklin’s original shop in 1718 was ‘at the Sun against St Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet’, near Curll’s shop at the Dial and Bible; the title page of The art of beauty (1719 [1718]) claimed he was also at the ‘Court of requests’. From about 1726 to 1758, he was located ‘under Tom’s Coffee-house in Covent Garden’, later no. 17 Russell Street. His move was paradigmatic of the book-trading world’s shift from the traditional St Paul’s and City environs into the newly emergent West End, and the continuing influence of coffee houses as centres for political and cultural discussion.