Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
We reach continuous firm ground in 1600 when John Francke, or Franckton
(as he called himself in 1602 and thenceforward), printed one or more
proclamations at Dublin. In 1604 Franckton was appointed King's Printer
for Ireland, and he continued at work till 1618, when he assigned his
patent to Felix Kyngston, Matthew Lownes, and Thomas Downes. Some
four-and-twenty proclamations and upwards of a dozen books and pamphlets
from his press are extant, some of them in Irish type. In 1620 the
office of Printer-General for Ireland was granted for a period of
twenty-one years to Kingston, Lownes, and Downes, all of them members of
the London Stationers' Company, and the usual imprint on the books they
issued is that of the Company (1620-33) or Society (1633-42) of
Stationers. They seem to have appointed an agent or factor to look after
their interests, and the last of these factors, William Bladen, about
1642 took over the business.
The earliest allusion to books printed in what afterwards became the
United States of America occurs in the diary of John Winthrop, Governor
of Massachusetts Bay, for March, 1639: "A printing house was begun at
Cambridge by one Stephen Daye, at the charge of Mr. Glover, who died on
sea hitherward. The first thing which was printed was the freemen's
Oath; the next was an almanac made for New England by Mr. William
Pierce, mariner; the next was the Psalms newly turned into metre." The
Mr. Glover here mentioned was the Rev. Joseph Glover, rector of Sutton
in Surrey from 1628 to 1636, who, after collecting funds for the benefit
of Harvard College at Cambridge, Mass., sailed with his family from
England in the summer of 1638, but died on the way. His widow (Elizabeth
Glover), shortly after her arrival, married the Rev. Henry Dunster, the
first President of Harvard, and thus, as had happened in Paris, the
first press in America was set up in a college under clerical auspices.
Stephen Day, the printer whom Glover had brought from England, is
naturally supposed to have been a descendant of John Day, the great
Elizabethan printer, but of this there is no evidence. He obtained some
grants of land in consideration of his services to the colony, but did
not greatly thrive, and in 1648, or early in 1649, was superseded by
Samuel Green. Of the specimens of his press mentioned by Governor
Winthrop the _Oath of a Freeman_ and the _Almanac_ have perished
utterly. Of the "Bay Psalter," or the "New England Version of the
Psalms," as it was subsequently called, at least eleven copies are known
to be extant, of which five are stated to be perfect.[62] It is a small
octavo of 148 leaves, disfigured by numerous misprints, but with
passable presswork. The translation was made by the Massachusetts
clergy, who prefixed to it "A discourse declaring not only the
lawfullnes but also the necessity of the heavenly ordinance of singing
Scripture Psalmes in the Churches of God." Its titlepage bears the name
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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