Benjamin Franklin Cryptograms
Every Benjamin Franklin quote in the collection, encoded fresh for print. Each answer page carries the year and the source we verified the wording from.
Eight lines from Franklin, seven of them out of Poor Richard's Almanack between 1733 and 1750 and one from the 1789 letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy. Franklin wrote for a reader who would see the line once a year and be expected to remember it, so the sentences are short, balanced, and built around a single concrete image: a small leak sinking a great ship, a sundial standing in the shade, dogs and fleas. Nothing runs past fifty-nine letters.
The brevity cuts both ways. There is less text to count, so frequency analysis is thin — but Franklin's habit of pairing two halves of a sentence around the same idea means repeated word shapes turn up far more often than they do in ordinary prose, and a repeated shape is worth more than a frequency count. Watch for the almanack rhythm: a short clause, a semicolon or a comma, then the payoff.
A classroom set that comes with its own history lesson, or a themed afternoon where the answer page is half the point. Every sheet cites the almanack year, so you can see the same voice working across seventeen years.
This section: 8 quotations, written between 1733 and 1789, 42 to 59 letters long, graded easy / medium / hard / expert. Voices you will meet: Benjamin Franklin.
The 2 sheets
Every sheet prints on US Letter with half-inch margins, gives you a blank line under each cipher letter, and keeps the answer key on its own page so nothing is spoiled while you work.