Boston: Printed by J. Franklin for S. Gerrish, 1718. First edition. 8vo. (viii), 76; (iv), 15, (1) pp. Modern three-quarter blue levant over blue linen-covered boards, stamped in gilt, boards slightly bowed; edges untrimmed; scattered very small chipping and wear along text edges; a few bottom corners repaired; very minor scattered spotting to text. Campbell X1b; Dexter, Congregationalism 2743. Evans 1996; Holmes, Cotton Mather 332; Increase Mather 23; Sabin 65613; Stevens, Bibliotheca Americana 1795; Streeter II: 668

One of the first two books printed during a twelve-year-old Benjamin Franklin's apprenticeship at his brother's printing shop.

In 1717, a 20-year-old James Franklin (1697-1735), the printer of the present book, returned to the British Province of Massachusetts Bay after having spent several years in London learning the trade of printing. He brought back to Boston a printing press and printer's type, and opened his own shop on Queen Street. He found cheap labor in the form of his twelve-year-old brother, Benjamin, who began a nine-year term in 1718 with him, as a printer's apprentice. It was an arrangement that only lasted five years before Benjamin struck out for Philadelphia.

The present work is one of the first two books to carry the J. Franklin imprint, the other being a re-printing of Theophilus Dorrington's A Familiar Guide to the Right and Profitable Receiving of the Lord's Supper (1718). It has not been conclusively determined which of these two titles was published first, though the current work had to have been printed after November 10, 1718, as that is the date of Benjamin Colman's preface to Ebenezer Pemberton's "Discourse." As no definitive order is known, the present work must share with the Dorrington reprint the honor of being the first book publication during Benjamin Franklin's printing apprenticeship. It is then the first original, non-reprinted book to be published by James Franklin, with the help of his apprentice.

A 1946 Goodspeed auction record asserts it was young Benjamin who set the type. If so, it would have been he who set the exuberant woodcut printer's ornaments, head-pieces, and historiated initials seen in this example.

According to RBH, this is the first copy of this work to be offered at auction since the Laird U. Park, Jr. sale in 2000, and only the second copy since the Streeter sale in 1967.