Titan Leeds

Titan Leeds (1699–1738) was an American publisher based in Philadelphia, best known for continuing his father’s almanac and for becoming the unwilling centerpiece of one of colonial America’s most elaborate print hoaxes. Born in Burlington, New Jersey, he inherited and expanded The American Almanack into the most prominent almanac in Philadelphia before Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack arrived on the scene. In 1733, Franklin publicly predicted the exact minute of Leeds’s death, a stunt borrowed from a British satirist, and then refused to retract the claim even after Leeds responded furiously in print. Leeds died in 1738, and his almanac folded shortly after, clearing the way for Poor Richard’s Almanack to become the bestselling almanac in the colonies.

Key facts

  • Born: 1699
  • Died: 1738
  • Occupation: publisher

Origins and Family

Titan Leeds was born in 1699 in Burlington, New Jersey, to Daniel Leeds and Dorothy Young. His father, Daniel Leeds, was a Quaker settler who had begun publishing The American Almanack as early as 1687, making it one of the earliest almanacs in the American colonies. The Quaker community in Burlington condemned the almanac for its astrological symbols and what they called ‘heathen’ language, and ordered copies burned.

The Leeds family carried a deeper stigma beyond almanac controversy. In 1700, Quaker writer Caleb Pusey published a pamphlet titled Satan’s Harbinger Encountered … Being Something by Way of Answer to Daniel Leeds, branding Daniel Leeds as ‘Satan’s Harbinger.’ That label attached itself to the family name, and Titan inherited both the publication and the reputation.

The American Almanack

Under Titan Leeds, The American Almanack was described by scholars as Philadelphia’s most prominent almanac before Poor Richard’s Almanack. It provided the dates of every court session from Virginia to New York and listed the times and places of Quaker meetings. Its masthead carried the tagline ‘Fitted to the Latitude of 40 degrees, and a Meridian of five hours west from London, but may without sensible error, serve all the adjacent places, even from New-found-land to Carolina,’ signaling an ambition that extended far beyond a single city or colony.

In 1728, Leeds redesigned the almanac’s masthead to include the Leeds family crest, which depicted three wyverns — bat-winged, dragon-like heraldic creatures with clawed feet — on a shield. The almanac was printed and sold by Andrew Bradford in Philadelphia, who remained Leeds’s primary publisher through the final 1738 edition.

The Franklin Hoax

In the first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, published in 1733, Benjamin Franklin predicted that Titan Leeds would die on October 17, 1733, at 3:29 P.M., at the precise moment of the conjunction of the Sun and Mercury. The prediction was a publicity stunt intended to drive The American Almanack out of business. The scheme was adapted from Jonathan Swift’s Bickerstaff hoax of 1708, in which Swift had used a pseudonym to predict the death of almanac-maker and astrologer John Partridge.

Leeds responded in his 1734 almanac with pointed force, calling Franklin a ‘false Predictor,’ ‘conceited Scribbler,’ ‘Fool,’ and ‘Lyar.’ Franklin’s counter-move was to treat Leeds’s very protest as proof that Leeds had already died and that an impostor was writing in his name. When Leeds actually died in 1738, Franklin publicly commended the supposed impostors for finally ending their charade.

Franklin had also caricatured Leeds as ‘Titan Pleiades’ in several Silence Dogood essays, owing to Leeds’s interest in astrology, predating the formal almanac rivalry between the two men.

Connection to the Jersey Devil Legend

Historian of science Brian Regal of Kean University has argued that the colonial-era rivalry between Franklin and Leeds resulted in the Leeds family being characterized as ‘monsters,’ and that this negative reputation contributed to the origins of the Jersey Devil legend. The land that Daniel Leeds had originally surveyed and acquired on New Jersey’s southern Atlantic Coast in the 1690s was inherited by his sons and is now known as Leeds Point, one of the Pine Barrens areas most closely associated with Jersey Devil sightings.

The traditional popular date for the Jersey Devil’s ‘birth,’ set in the mid-1730s, falls close to the period of Titan Leeds’s alleged death as declared by Franklin.

Legacy

After Leeds’s death in 1738, his almanac soon folded, and Poor Richard’s Almanack filled the void, becoming the bestselling almanac in the colonies. The commercial weight of Leeds’s name did not vanish immediately: Andrew Bradford published a posthumous 1746 edition of The American Almanack under Titan Leeds’s name, eight years after his death.

Oxford Reference describes Leeds as the Philadelphia publisher of The American Almanack, mainly remembered as the victim of a hoax by Benjamin Franklin. The New-York Historical Society holds some of the only known copies of early 18th-century editions of Daniel Leeds’s American Almanack, as part of a collection of approximately 5,500 American almanacs.

Did you know

  • Franklin advertised his first Poor Richard’s Almanack in the December 19, 1732 edition of the Pennsylvania Gazette, specifically mentioning ‘the prediction of the death of his friend Mr. Titan Leeds’ as a selling point for the publication. (utne.com)
  • Titan Leeds was a client of Samuel Keimer’s Philadelphia print shop, the very shop where Benjamin Franklin himself once worked, which means Franklin was personally familiar with Leeds before their public rivalry began. (sothebys.com)
  • The traditionally believed date for the ‘birth’ of the Jersey Devil, popularly set in the mid-1730s, coincides closely with the period of Titan Leeds’s alleged death as declared by Benjamin Franklin in his almanac. (skepticalinquirer.org)
  • The land originally surveyed and acquired by Daniel Leeds on New Jersey’s southern Atlantic Coast in the 1690s was inherited by his sons and is now known as Leeds Point, one of the Pine Barrens areas most associated with Jersey Devil sightings. (nationalgeographic.com)

Data sources

Data updated: 2026-10-31