2 Benjamin Franklin first editions are documented on this shelf, from Experiments and Observations on Electricity (1751) to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin) (1791) across 2 different publishers. Each linked guide gives the points of issue that separate a true first printing of that Benjamin Franklin title from later printings and book-club copies — the publisher and year to expect, the number-line or edition-statement conventions, and the tells that show up in online listings.

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Experiments and Observations on Electricity — 1751 · Printed and sold by E. Cave, at St. John's Gate, LondonQuarto, appeared April 1751 with the imprint 'London: Printed and sold by E. Cave, at St. John's Gate. 1751.' The full title reads 'Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin, and Communicated in several Letters to Mr. P. Collinson, of London, F.R.S.' Part I collates [4], 86, [2] pp. with one folding engraved plate signed 'T. Jefferys sculp.'; signatures…. The census claim is correct, and the counter-intuitive fact is precisely the point worth publishing: the most important scientific book of eighteenth-century America (Printing and the Mind of Man) has a London first edition and no American first at all. Franklin's letters went to Peter Collinson, who communicated them to the Royal Society; Edward Cave of the Gentleman's Magazine printed them at St. John's Gate.…. No book clubs; the governing trap here is the phrase 'first complete edition'. Five English editions appeared in Franklin's lifetime: the first, 1751, with the additional parts of 1753 and 1754; the second, 1754 (Parts I and II only); the third, 1760, with further parts in 1762 and 1764; the fourth, 1769; and the fifth, 1774. The 1769 fourth edition (London: for David Henry, sold by Francis Newbery) states on its….
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (Mémoires de la vie privée de Benjamin Franklin) — 1791 · Buisson, ParisParis: Chez Buisson, 1791. Octavo, two parts in one volume, in French, translated by Jacques Gibelin (the attribution is Quérard's) from one of the manuscript fair copies Franklin had sent to friends in France. The first-printing tell is a paging fault present in every recorded copy: the four final text pages, 204-207, are misnumbered 360-363 — Bauman's cataloguing calls the mispagination of the four final text…. The true first is the French Buisson edition of 1791, and the census is correct: there is no earlier English printing, and this is one of the classic cases of an American author's masterwork appearing first in translation. The first English-language appearance is 'The Private Life of the Late Benjamin Franklin, LL.D.... Originally written by himself, and now translated from the French' (London: printed for J.…. No book-club issue applies to the 1791 Buisson printing. The recurring hazards are 'first thus' traps rather than club editions: the 1793 Parsons London and 1794 American editions are sometimes offered as the 'first edition of the Autobiography' when they are retranslations; the Bigelow 1868 is correctly the first complete and authentic English text but is not the first edition of the work; and the 1818 Temple….

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