Part 1

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THE PRINTER in Eighteenth-Century _WILLIAMSBURG_

An Account of his Life & Times, & of his Craft

_Williamſburg Craft Series_

_WILLIAMSBURG_ Publiſhed by _Colonial Williamſburg_ MMI

_A Word to the Reader about Eighteenth-Century Typography_

The paragraphs on this Page and the next have been ſet in an eighteenth-century Manner. The Type uſed is _Caſlon_, developed in the early Part of the eighteenth Century by _William Caſlon_, the greateſt of the Engliſh Letter Founders. _Caſlon_ in 1734 iſſued his firſt Broadſide Specimen Sheet of Type Faces cut at his Foundry during the preceding Decade and a Half.

Although _Caſlon_ is famous for the beautiful Type that bears his Name, he deſerves equal Credit for deſigning ſome of the moſt handſome Type Ornaments or “Flowers” ever developed, before or after his Time. Such Type Flowers had many Uſes—to embelliſh Initial Letters at the Beginning of a Chapter in a Book; as decorative Devices in a ſingle Row over a Type Heading ſtarting a new Page in a Book; or over Headings each Time a new Subject was introduced in a Text. Flowers were caſt to all the regular Bodies of the Letter from the ſmall (_Nonpareil_) to the large (_Great Primer_) Size. The Type Flowers uſed at the Head of this Page, in the built-up Initial opening the firſt Paragraph, and elſewhere in this Publication are reproduced from original eighteenth-century Flowers excavated at the Site of the Printing Office on _Duke of Glouceſter_ Street in _Williamſburg_.

The longs “s” ſo evident in theſe Paragraphs originated in the _German_ Hand Script. Early _German_ Type Founders attempted to reproduce Handwriting as cloſely as poſſible. In the Attempt the long “s” was evolved and was adopted by the firſt _Engliſh_ Printers who learned their Trade from the _Germans_. The long “s” remained in general Uſe until about the Year 1800. It was always uſed at the Beginning and in the Middle of a Word, but never to terminate a Word. It can eaſily be recognized by the Fact of having only half a Croſſbar or none at all, whereas the Letter “f” has a full Croſſbar.

Ligatures, ſuch as ct, ſb, ſſ, ſi, ſſi, ſk, ſl, ſſl, ſt, fi, ffi, ff, fl, ffl, were developed where a long “s” or an “f” overlapped the following Letter. Caſting the two Characters together avoided Damage to the overlapping Letter. Although ſome Ligatures have fallen into Diſuſe, the fi, ffi, ff, fl, and ffl are ſtill common today.

Printers alſo applied, through much of the Century, ſome Rules of Style which the modern Reader may find odd if not awkward. For Example, they began all Nouns with a capital Letter, thus diſtinguiſhing them from other Parts of Speech ſuch as Adjectives, Verbs, &c. In the ſame Faſhion, they capitalized Expreſſions of particular Emphaſis, and Titles of Honor and Eminence. The Names of Perſons and Places they not only began with capital Letters but usually ſet in _Italic_ Type as well.

With the exception of certain _Scottiſh_ faces, small Capitals were found in _Roman_ Fonts of Type only. They were employed to denote Emphaſis and Streſs, and were uſed where the large Capitals would not fit, i.e., were too long. Small Capitals were alſo found in the firſt Word of the firſt Paragraph after every Break in Context of a Chapter or Section of Text.

Strange though ſome eighteenth-century Printing may appear to today’s Reader, there is one Point that ſhould be ſtreſſed. The Idioſyncracies of a Type Page of the Period were not merely Whims of individual Printers. They were the Faſhion of the Time. When a Printer uſed ſeveral Sizes and Styles of Type on a Page, he was practicing what he and his Contemporaries conſidered to be good Typography.

The Printer in Eighteenth-Century _Williamsburg_

_The Printer in Eighteenth-Century_ Williamsburg

If you had visited Williamsburg in the year 1743, say, and wanted to post a letter, buy a book, a newspaper, or some writing paper, or talk with an influential townsman, you would have sought out the shop of William Parks on Duke of Gloucester Street. Parks published the _Virginia Gazette_, the first newspaper in the Virginia colony, and his printing office served also as post office, bookshop, stationery store, and general information center.

It was a place of many sounds and smells, and of much activity. There you would find ink-smudged printer’s devils carefully sorting type under the watchful eye of the journeyman printer, an accomplished craftsman and exacting instructor. There you would also find the bookbinder among his calfskins, marbled papers, glues, and presses. And on the shelves, waiting for buyers, were pamphlets and leatherbound volumes produced in the shop or imported from England.

Perhaps, if you were lucky, you might see a postrider burst in with London papers, rushed from a ship just arrived from England. Then the printing shop was never livelier, for the coming of news from abroad was an exciting event. At such times, Printer Parks probably stopped what he was doing, culled the choicest items from the London journals, and made space for them on the front page of the next issue of the _Gazette_. In a day or so, “the freshest Advices, Foreign and Domestick,” would be on their way to Parks’s subscribers.

In the small (1,500 people) capital of Williamsburg, this printing office was a nerve center through which news of the vast outer world reached Virginians and, in turn, news of His Majesty’s largest American colony was conveyed to other colonists and their homeland. By modern standards it was a small printing shop. But in its effect on the people of the Virginia colony, it was a powerful civilizing force. As one of eight or nine printers of colonial newspapers, moreover, William Parks, through his paper, kept the people of the other colonies informed of the major events that were taking place in the oldest and largest outpost of Britain in America.

_THE PRINTING OFFICE TODAY_

For these reasons, Colonial Williamsburg has re-created an eighteenth-century printing office as one of its series of craft shops. Here the twentieth-century visitor will find equipment such as was used two hundred years ago in similar printing establishments on Duke of Gloucester Street operated by Parks and later by William Hunter, Joseph Royle, Alexander Purdie, John Dixon, William Hunter, Jr., William Rind, and their successors. Here a master printer and his apprentice, in the leather aprons and full-cut breeches of the period, set by hand type closely resembling that which Parks used.

To print its pages of hand-set type, the present Printing Office has in operation three so-called “English Common Presses” such as were built in the eighteenth century. One, believed to have been made about 1750, was given to Colonial Williamsburg by American Type Founders, Incorporated, and the Rochester Institute of Technology. Of the other two, one was designed by Ralph Green of Chicago after a careful study of the handful of known eighteenth-century presses in the United States, and both were built by Colonial Williamsburg craftsmen.

In addition to the _Gazette_, tracts, pamphlets, and books poured from Parks’s press from the time he came to Williamsburg about 1730 until he died on a voyage to England in 1750. Surviving examples of his work reveal that he first used Dutch type, which was followed by the more pleasing face so “friendly to the eye” developed by William Caslon in England. From matrices similar to Caslon’s originals, his successors in the type-founding business have cast the letters used on the restored Williamsburg press. Parks’s neat printing and binding ornaments, so characteristic of the classical-minded eighteenth century, have been similarly reproduced. Eighteenth-century printers’ tools were made from the careful drawings in Diderot’s Encyclopedia and from other sources.

To provide the kind of paper used by eighteenth-century printers, Colonial Williamsburg began research in the 1930s into the history of the town’s only paper mill. Started by Parks about 1743 with the help of his friend Benjamin Franklin, the mill is believed to have outlived him. Examples of its product were identified in 1936 in a German Bible and a song book printed in Pennsylvania in 1763. Paper that simulated the Parks paper was thereupon reproduced, and was used in some of the work of the Printing Office and in some Colonial Williamsburg books designed after examples of Parks’s work. Even the specks and spots of the original Parks paper were imitated by a mixture of ground flaxseed incorporated into the paper to insure the appearance of authenticity.

Visitors to the Printing Office today may not see counterparts of the postriders who brought mail to Parks’s printing shop and post office, but nearly everything else is there. As in colonial days, the central figure is still the printer, bending over his press and producing in a day’s work what one modern, mechanized press can turn out in a few minutes.

_WILLIAMSBURG’S FIRST PRINTER_

Although the colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, it was not until the eighteenth century that printing was established there. This delay was largely due to governmental policy. In seventeenth-century England and her colonies, freedom of the press was yet to be established. Even laws passed by governing bodies could not without official permission be printed and circulated for the benefit of citizens. Until the Licensing Act of 1662 expired in 1695, the printing trade in England was confined to London, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and to the English city of York. The governors of the royal colony of Virginia felt empowered to refuse permission for the establishment of printing until the year 1690, after which printers were governed by royal instructions which required a license and permission from the governor as a prerequisite to setting up shop.

Sir William Berkeley, who was governor of Virginia from 1642 to 1652 and again from 1660 to 1677, summarized the attitude of most officials of his day in his famous statement, “But, I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both.” (Berkeley was in error: free schools _had_ existed in Virginia, though printing had not.)

In 1682, a few years after Berkeley wrote, a printer named William Nuthead came to Jamestown, then the capital of Virginia, proposing to serve the government by printing the acts of the Assembly. He was ordered by the Governor’s Council to await royal approval. Several months later a new governor arrived with an order from the king that “no person be permitted to use any press for printing upon any occasion whatsoever.” Nuthead moved to Maryland, and printing in Virginia was delayed fifty years.

_TYPOGRAPHIA._ AN ODE, ON PRINTING.

Inſcrib’d to the Honourable WILLIAM GOOCH, ^_Eſq_; His Majesty’s Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in Chief of the Colony of _VIRGINIA_.

—— _Pleni ſunt omnes Libri, plenæ ſapientum voces, plena Exemplorum vetuſtas; quæ jacerent in Tenebris omnia, niſi Literarum Lumen accederet._ Cic. Orat. pro Archia.

_WILLIAMSBURG:_ Printed by William Parks. M,DCC,XXX.

Before 1730, however, a more tolerant attitude had developed. With the permission of Governor William Gooch, the English-born William Parks moved that year from Annapolis to Williamsburg, which had succeeded Jamestown as the capital of Virginia in 1699. He was designated public printer of Virginia, at an annual salary of £120 a year, eventually increased to £280. Parks continued to print the acts of the Virginia Assembly, which he had begun several years before in Maryland, and soon advertised for subscriptions for a proposed _Virginia Miscellany_ “at his House, near the Capitol, in Williamsburg.” Before the year was out he had printed several works, at least five of which are known by title. One of these is an ode to printing, _Typographia_, by one “J. Markland,” which salutes Gooch for his encouragement of printing. In the high-flown style of its day, the ode concludes:

“_A Ruler’s gentle Influence Shall o’er his Land be shewn; Saturnian Reigns shall be renew’d Truth, Justice, Vertue, be pursu’d Arts flourish, Peace shall crown the Plains, Where GOOCH administers, AUGUSTUS reigns._”

Parks was Williamsburg’s most distinguished eighteenth-century printer and probably its most successful. In the annals of his craft in America he is ranked with Benjamin Franklin and William Bradford, the foremost printers in Pennsylvania and New York. Parks, like all of his brethren, depended for his bread and butter on printing blank forms (deeds, mortgages, bills, and the like), government work (such as proclamations, forms, and laws), almanacs, and other job work, but he helped establish in the American colonies that dependence upon free and fair discussion of issues in the newspapers which strengthened the concept of a free press. He gave impetus to literature in a colony that had lacked the local means for its encouragement. By his example, he was partly responsible for the rash of journalistic enterprise in pre-Revolutionary Williamsburg.

Parks’s most influential act was his founding of the _Virginia Gazette_, the first newspaper to be published in Virginia and the second south of Maryland. Begun in 1736, this weekly was the leader of a colorful succession of similarly named sheets in Williamsburg and later in Richmond, to which the Virginia government removed in 1780. And in these _Gazettes_—in the 1770s published by as many as three competing printers at a time—can be found a rich chronicle of the events in the colonies leading to the American Revolution. Important foreign and domestic occurrences were described in dispatches—perhaps taken in some cases from private correspondence—and in excerpts from other newspapers. The editor rarely reported local happenings beyond a brief mention of ship arrivals, marriages, deaths, fires, and the like. He often printed legal notices and entire acts of the Virginia Assembly, without comment. Fulsomely phrased letters to the editor posed weighty questions of government, science, or theology.

The modern reader will find the _Virginia Gazette_ of 1736 to 1750 undramatic in its lack of headlines, pictures, and display type. But the ingredients of human interest are there, subtly in the note of controversy which gradually built up to the Revolution, and emphatically in the advertisements, which largely financed the _Gazette_. Many are the notices of runaway slaves, strayed farm animals, husbands deserted by wives, or blooded horses available for racing or breeding. From the advertisements, also, the contemporary Virginia reader could learn of the arrival of goods from London—articles of fashion that were highly prized by Virginians as evidence of their Englishness. In an early issue of the _Gazette_, Parks states:

“Advertisement, concerning Advertisements

“All Persons who have Occasion to buy or sell Houses, Lands, Goods, or Cattle; or have Servants or Slaves Runaway; or have lost Horses, Cattle, &c. or want to give any Publick Notice; may have it advertis’d in all these _Gazettes_ printed in one Week, for Three Shillings, and for Two Shillings _per_ Week for as many Weeks afterwards as they shall order, by giving or sending their Directions to the _Printer_ hereof.

“And, as these Papers will circulate (as speedily as possible) not only all over This, but also the Neighbouring Colonies, and will probably be read by some Thousands of People, it is very likely they may have the desir’d Effect; and it is certainly the cheapest and most effectual Method that can be taken, for Publishing any Thing of this Nature.”

_PRINTING IN AN AGRICULTURAL ECONOMY_

William Parks’s significant achievements seem even greater if one understands the difficulties of operating a business in the Williamsburg of 1730-1750. Because Virginia’s colonial prosperity was based on a one-crop economy—tobacco—little “ready money” was in circulation within the colony. The weed itself became a sort of currency. The usual practice was for the plantation owner or the small farmer to subsist on his produce and his credit until the crop was harvested and shipped to English merchants, who from the proceeds of its sale bought for the planter such articles as he had directed. Because all American tobacco was transported to Britain in British vessels, shipping space was plentiful on the westward passage, and shipowners and British merchants offered Virginia buyers cheap freight rates on finished goods. Thus such English manufactures as cloth, furniture, pewter, silver, and ceramics were sold to Virginia planters and merchants.

The two-way trade between Virginia planters and British merchants slowed down the development of a large Virginia artisan group. Accordingly, local industry was limited in eighteenth-century Virginia, even in an urban center such as Williamsburg. Virginia craftsmen complained bitterly of unpaid accounts, the necessity of accepting such “country pay” as tobacco, corn, and beef, and the paucity of buyers who offered ready money.

It is easy to understand why William Parks found relatively few craftsmen in the Williamsburg of his day. Except for a few trades such as cabinetmaking, blacksmithing, coopering, wigmaking, tailoring, and shoemaking, the Virginia capital was largely a community of taverns, townhouses, and governmental institutions, and the colony itself was overwhelmingly rural. There is no doubt that Virginia’s reliance on agriculture, a reliance approved by British mercantile theory, resulted in an overdependence on the industry of the mother country. We can thank the peculiarities of Parks’s situation—the inability of English printers to satisfy Virginians’ desire for regional news, and the subsidy Parks received as public printer—that his craft became firmly established in the 1730s in Virginia. Indeed, it seems clear that the prospect of becoming Virginia’s public printer was what lured Parks from Annapolis to Williamsburg in the first place.

_PARKS’S SUCCESSORS IN WILLIAMSBURG_

Altogether, Williamsburg had at least twelve master printers and three separate printing locations or offices during the colonial period. After Parks died on a voyage to England, William Hunter, the man whom he had left in charge, bought the business. Publication of the _Virginia Gazette_ continued, and Hunter became public printer and postmaster. In the latter capacity he worked in close association with an astute Philadelphia printer, Benjamin Franklin, with whom he served jointly as deputy postmaster-general for all the colonies. Hunter printed in 1754 the first published writing of George Washington, entitled _The Journal of Major George Washington, sent by the Hon. Robert Dinwiddie, Esq; His Majesty’s Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in Chief of Virginia, to the Commandant of the French Forces on Ohio...._

May 10, 1776. NUMBER 67. THE VIRGINIA GAZETTE. Always for LIBERTY, And the PUBLICK GOOD. ALEXANDER PURDIE, Printer.

MAY 17, 1776. NUMBER 68. THE VIRGINIA GAZETTE. THIRTEEN UNITED COLONIES. _United, we stand—Divided, we fall._ Always for LIBERTY, And the PUBLICK GOOD.

JUNE 7, 1776. NUMBER 71. THE VIRGINIA GAZETTE. Always for LIBERTY, And the PUBLICK GOOD. _High_ HEAVEN _to_ GRACIOUS ENDS _directs the_ STORM:

After Hunter’s death in 1761, the printing office had a succession of owners and operators. As tension increased between Great Britain and her American colonies, especially after the adoption of the Stamp Act in 1765, the relation of public printer to government became more difficult. The printer faced the necessity of maintaining good relations with both loyalist and patriot elements in the House of Burgesses. One loyalist reader of the _Gazette_, the Reverend John Camm, complained in the early 1760s that Hunter’s successor, Joseph Royle, refused to publish Camm’s pamphlet arguing the cause of Church of England clergymen because of its “Satyrical Touches upon the Late Assembly.” On the other hand, certain patriot members criticized Royle in the columns of the _Maryland Gazette_ for allegedly refusing to print their criticisms of local government. The printer was caught between fires.

Criticism of the _Gazette_ continued after Royle died in January 1766, and Alexander Purdie, a Scotsman, took over the business. In what is thought to have been his first issue, Purdie announced that “the press shall likewise be as free as any Gentleman can wish, or desire; and I crave the countenance and favour of the publick no longer than my conduct may appear to merit their approbation.” Later the same month, Purdie wrote, “As I understand it is thought by some that I have neglected, or refused, to publish the account of a late transaction at Hobb’s Hole [Tappahannock], this is to assure the publick ... that I never saw the same, nor was it ever offered to me to publish, otherwise it would have seen the light before this time: For I do now, as I have heretofore declared, that my press shall be as free as any Gentleman can wish or desire; that is, as free as any publick press upon the continent.” In 1775, after Purdie established another _Virginia Gazette_, his paper bore the appealing motto “Always for Liberty, and the Publick Good.”

_TOWARD A FREE PRESS_