The True Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin once tied himself to his kite and let it tow him across a pond a mile wide. The boy who turned swimming into an experiment would keep surprising people long after he left the water.

Writing in the late nineteenth century, Sydney George Fisher sets out to look past the polished legend and meet Franklin as a man: muscular printer, eager swimmer, practical experimenter, lover of books—and, at fifteen, a vegetarian saving dinner money to buy them. From Boston to London and Philadelphia, Franklin’s working life was strenuous, but his manner remained curiously unhurried; even his anger, Fisher suggests, was more likely to produce a joke than an outburst. The familiar public figure comes into view through his habits, appetites, and contradictions. What else lies beneath that calm, genial face?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.