Franklin’s Passy Press Passports: A Collector’s Guide
The Diplomat Who Ran His Own Printing Press: Franklin’s Passy Passports and the Book That Saved Their Story
Benjamin Franklin spent nine years in France running what amounted to a one man intelligence operation with a printing press at its center, and the passports he produced there are some of the rarest documents in American history.
Most people know Franklin for the lightning rod, the bifocals, the face on the hundred dollar bill. Fewer know that between 1776 and 1785, while lodging at the Hôtel de Valentinois in the Paris suburb of Passy, he set up a private print shop that turned out everything from loan certificates to his own satirical essays, and, most importantly for collectors like me, the earliest official American passports. I’ve spent years chasing down the story of what came out of that shop, and it’s one of the more overlooked chapters in the whole history of American travel documents.
A Diplomat’s Print Shop, Hidden in Plain Sight
Franklin built his own printing operation at Passy because he couldn’t trust anyone else to control who got official American papers. When he arrived in France in 1776 as the fledgling nation’s first minister plenipotentiary, his job was straightforward on paper and nearly impossible in practice: secure a military alliance with France while the Revolutionary War hung in the balance. Communication with Congress took months to cross the Atlantic, so American sailors, merchants, and escaped prisoners of war showing up in France needed documentation Franklin could issue on the spot.
ℹ️ Exactly THIS passport in the left picture arrived in my inbox, not my mailbox (see link below)
He’d apprenticed as a printer in his youth and never really stopped thinking like one. Rather than farming the work out to Parisian print shops (who would gladly have taken the job), Franklin installed his own press at his lodgings, brought his grandson Benjamin “Benny” Franklin Bache into the operation, and kept tight personal control over every document that left the building. Passports, loan certificates, and his famous Bagatelles all came off that same press.
The Typeface Built to Catch Forgers
Franklin commissioned a custom typeface for his passports specifically so that a forgery could be spotted at a glance. British agents and opportunistic forgers had every reason to want their hands on blank American travel documents, so Franklin turned to the Fournier family’s Paris type foundry, one of the most respected in Europe, to cast a typeface exclusively for his use. It became known as “le Franklin,” and because it existed nowhere else, any document using it that hadn’t come from his press was immediately suspect. It’s a clever bit of 18th century security printing, the same underlying logic that shows up in modern passports as microprinting and proprietary type today.
Genuine surviving examples are almost impossible to find outside institutional collections. I’ve had readers write to me over the years asking whether a family document might be the real thing, and on one occasion it genuinely was: a passport issued in May 1780 to four crew members of the USS Alliance, later authenticated by Yale. I wrote up that whole story, including how the verification played out, if you want to see what one of these actually looks like in hand.
Bringing the Passports Back to Light in 1925
The William L. Clements Library commissioned a landmark facsimile volume in 1925 precisely because the originals were already disappearing into vaults. Titled The Passports Printed by Benjamin Franklin at His Passy Press, the book gathered facsimile reproductions of passport variants that hadn’t been included in an earlier 1914 Grolier Club study, along with historical notes credited to Randolph G. Adams and a reprint of Luther S. Livingston’s earlier essay “The Blank Passport.”
What makes this book a genuine object of desire on its own, apart from its subject matter, is who built it. Bruce Rogers, widely regarded as one of the finest book designers of the 20th century, designed the volume and printed it himself at the Harvard University Press for the Clements Library in November 1925. He later included it among his own list of thirty favorite books he’d ever produced. The full cataloging record confirms the production details: exactly 505 copies, folio format, printed on French Arches paper, bound in cloth backed marbled boards. If you collect fine press books at all, this one sits at a genuinely satisfying intersection of typography and American history.
What This Legacy Actually Costs a Collector
If you’re hoping to own a piece of the Passy story, the honest answer is that your options split sharply between “essentially unobtainable” and “genuinely attainable.”
Original single sheet Passy passports from the 1770s and 1780s live almost exclusively in institutional collections like Yale and the American Philosophical Society. I want to be straightforward here rather than throw out a number that sounds authoritative: I haven’t found a documented public auction sale of an original Passy passport, at any price. If one surfaced at a major house, it would likely draw serious six figure interest given the rarity and the Founding era provenance, but that’s an informed estimate on my part, not a market record. For comparison, I track celebrity and historical passport auction results on the site to give collectors a sense of what genuinely comparable documents have realized.
The 1925 Clements Library book, on the other hand, shows up in the rare book trade regularly enough to have a real price range. Worn copies with rubbed corners or a chipped spine tend to run $50 to $110. Cleaner “very good” copies land closer to $110 to $225, and a genuinely fine copy with its original glassine dust wrapper can command more from specialist dealers.
Why the Passy Story Still Matters to Collectors
Franklin’s Passy Press is a reminder that the printing press did as much for American independence as anything fired from a musket. Whether you’re realistically aiming for a well preserved copy of Bruce Rogers’ 1925 volume or you’re the rare collector who someday gets a shot at an actual surviving passport, this corner of history sits right at the crossing point of typography, security, and the earliest days of American diplomacy abroad.
Further reading: The Benjamin Franklin Passport That Arrived in My Inbox, Not My Mailbox
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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