Some Penguin Classics provide the best possible invitation right there with their covers, and I know almost no better example of this than the old 2003 edition of Benjamin Franklin’s The Autobiography and Other Writings, edited and introduced by the great American historian and biographer Kenneth Silverman (whose Pulitzer Prize-winning 1985 biography of Cotton Mather you should all rush right out and read). There on its cover is the utterly charming Norman Rockwell painting Ben Franklin’s Belles, the perfect enticement for the wavering reader to step in and explore the book.

As Silverman makes clear, the original readers of the Autobiography would have needed precious little in the way of such enticement. For those readers, Franklin himself was all the reason they’d need, and nobody knew that better than Franklin himself:

Given … his customary pose of authorial modesty, readers may find his self-portrait muted and lacking in glamour. But even when he began the book, knowledge of his accomplishments was so widespread that he could take it for granted. He therefore wrote from the point of view of his own legend. He would show his readers how he became what he knew he had in their minds become.

Franklin’s account of himself – highly sculpted, highly edited, highly self-regarding – is evergreen in its enjoyability, but Silverman isn’t half-bad himself, giving us a Franklin in his Introduction who’s almost as fascinating as Franklin himself thought he was:

Franklin’s fame has depended not only on his achievements but also on his personality and character. His geniality and wit made others long for his company. And to his more than fifty years of public service – crowned by his part in writing the Declaration of Independence, his role as American minister plenipotentiary to France, and his attendance at the convention that devised the Constitution of the United States – he brought a sensitive understanding of human nature and a realistic view of the possibilities for human happiness, together with enormous self-confidence, shrewdness, and tact. Gifted with foresight – indeed a kind of seer – he made remarkably few bad decisions, although often faced with momentous choices.

There are, of course, innumerable editions of Franklin’s Autobiography out there in circulation, including some that run to hundreds of pages of notes and annotations. But this paperback is my favorite – and its cover doesn’t hurt at all.