This Arion edition has been published in celebration of the three-hundredth anniversary of Benjamin Franklin's birth. Unpublished at the time of his death, it has since become the most widely read memoir of all time. In the Arion Press edition, this classic is letterpress printed from a new digital typeface with historical relevance for Franklin and the American Revolution. Accompanying the book is a softcover booklet detailing the history of the discovery and acquisition of Franklin's lost manuscript by John Bigelow in Paris in 1867. 

Franklin’s Autobiography presents with vividness the key episodes in a young man’s rise, from poor apprentice to prominent citizen. Its unifying theme is the lessons in behavior and morality he learns along the way. It has been accurately described as a conduct book, but it is a greatly entertaining one. The Autobiography brings Franklin the writer to life for the modern reader, as a storyteller of genius, who chooses just the right moment to laugh at himself.

This edition marks the first use of an historic American typeface, Binny & Ronaldson's Roman No. 1 (c. 1800), as recreated in digital form by Arion Press and named Aitken for Robert Aitken, the famous printer during the Revolution, and his daughter Jane Aitken, printer of the first American translation of the Bible (1808).