[Benjamin] Franklin borrowed the name “Richard Saunders” from the seventeenth-century author of Rider’s British Merlin, a popular London almanac which continued to be published throughout the eighteenth century. Franklin created the Poor Richard persona based in part on Jonathan Swift’s pseudonymous character, “Isaac Bickerstaff”. In a series of three letters in 1708 and 1709, known as the Bickerstaff papers, “Bickerstaff” predicted the imminent death of astrologer and almanac maker John Partridge. Franklin’s Poor Richard, like Bickerstaff, claimed to be a philomath and astrologer and, like Bickerstaff, predicted the deaths of actual astrologers who wrote traditional almanacs. In the early editions of Poor Richard’s Almanack, predicting and falsely reporting the deaths of these astrologers—much to their dismay—was something of a running joke. 

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