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