Benjamin Franklin’s First Government Printing: The Pa General Loan Office Mortgage Register of 1729, and Subsequent Franklin Mortgage Registers and Bo

Among the items acquired in 1996 by Jay Snider, the collector of printed Americana, are 278 partially printed, early Pennsylvania mortgage forms. The royal folio forms are bound together, as issued, in full calf stamped with tools thought to have belond to William Davies, a bookbinder who flourished in Philadelphia from 1722 to 1740. The mortgage forms include printed preambles identifying Pennsylvania’s General Loan Office trustees as the mortgagees, and manuscript completions dated as early as Sept. 23, 1729. It has been established that it was printed by Benjamin Franklin and Hugh Meredith with their firsst font of pica type. This illustrated study places the Snider volume in its historical, political, biographical, and bibliographical context. Index.