Richard Franklin (d. 1765; fl. 1719–1765)
Richard Franklin, bookseller, printer, and publisher, 1719–1764; at the Court of Requests Westminster, 1719; at the Sun against St. Dunstan’s Church in Fleetstreet, 1719–1722 or –1723; under Tom’s Coffee-house in Covent Garden, later no. 17 Russell Street, 1724–1764. He was apprenticed to Edmund Curll on 7 May 1711 (Muri and Rogers, Notes and Queries 69.4, December 2022).
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A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1668 to 1725, by Henry Plomer (1922)
FRANCKLIN, or FRANKLIN (RICHARD), bookseller in London, Sun in Fleet Street, 1720–1. Published N. Amhurst's Familiar Epistle from Tunbridge Wells, 1720. [Wrenn, i. 8.] He also wrote in 1721 an answer to Amhurst's Epistle to Sir John Blount. [Bodl. G. Pamph. 2716.]
A Dictionary of the Printers and Booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1726 to 1775, by Henry Plomer et al. (1932)
FRANKLIN or FRANCKLIN (RICHARD), printer, bookseller, and publisher in London, Tom's Coffee House, Covent Garden, 1726–56. See Dictionary, 1668–1725. In 1726 he became the printer and publisher of The Craftsman, a periodical, started and maintained by Nicholas Amhurst under the pseudonym of Caleb D'Anvers, which became notorious for its outspoken attacks on the Government of the day. Franklin was frequently prosecuted and imprisoned for libel; and while he deserves some measure of sympathy as a "martyr" to the liberty of the press, his disgraceful treatment of his journeyman, Henry Haines (q. v.), whom he used as a "cat's paw" and left to starve in gaol, was a great blot on his character. In his later years, Richard Franklin lived at Strawberry Hill, occupying the cottage in the enclosure which Horace Walpole called the "Flower Garden". Writing to Richard Bentley on July 17th, 1755, Walpole says, "Can there be an odder revolution of things, than that the printer of The Craftsman should live in a house of mine?"; and again in a letter to John Chute he writes, "I had a little private satisfaction in very naturally telling my Lord Bath how happy I have made his old printer, Franklyn". [Letters, 1857 ed. II. 451; III. 18.]
Notes & Queries "London Booksellers Series" (1931–2)
FRANKLIN, R. He was a bookseller at the Court of Requests Westminster by 1719, and was still carrying on his business in 1750. In 1720 he collaborated with J. Peele, of Locke's Head in Fleet Street, in the production of 'The Passionate Lover, A Novel,' while in 1724 he published 'A Historical and Critical Essay on the Thirty-Nine Articles.'
—Frederick T. Wood, 15 August 1931