Titan Leeds and the Great Almanac Hoax – Blog #4A

Greetings, Citizens, and thank you for your continued interest in my adventures. I present you my humblest apologies for having failed to get to this delicious story last week, and do hope you’ll find it enjoyable now.  It concerns my rivalry with a certain Titan Leeds, an almanac writer like myself and my biggest competitor in Philadelphia for readers. I wrote of Mr. Leeds in the previous two entries should you be curious and wish to refer to them.  The period in question is 1732, when I was 26 years of age.

Now Mr. Leeds was, as I knew, a very serious and self-important man.  I was certainly thinking of him when I made one of my “Ben Franklin Quotations,” “A man who falls in love with himself shall never lack for a suitor,” and made sure that this quote got into an edition of my “Poor Richard’s Almanac.”

In that first issue of “Poor Richard’s Almanac,”  I decided to poke and provoke the good Mr. Leeds.  Therefore, I printed the rather startling and unexpected prediction that Titan Leeds was going to die at a very exact time on a very specific day – October 17, 1733, at 3:29 pm!  Well he was so horrified by this perceived impertinence that he counter-blasted me in his own almanac in the most outraged terms conceivable.  I was, he said, “a Fool and a Lyar” and a scoundrel for having made such statements; a disgrace to the printing trade. He called my statement an outrageous, unsupportable attack and an indefensible breech of good taste and sputtered on, saying that nobody should buy my newspapers or my almanacs forthwith, and etc, ad infinitum.  Read more... (372 words, 1 image, estimated 1:29 mins reading time)