Hamilton’s own record of the trial went into the _Brief Narrative_, as is indicated by this passage from one of the letters that the Philadelphia barrister wrote to his friend and colleague in New York: I have at last sent you my draft of Mr. Zenger’s trial.... I have had no time to read it over but once since it was finished. I wrote it by half-sheets and copied it as fast as I wrote. The meaning of all this is to beg you to alter and correct it agreeable to your own mind.[36] Thus Alexander even edited the text submitted by the defense attorney, and the latter’s acceptance of the result shows how faithfully it reflected the spoken word. Alexander clearly has given us the events of August 4, 1735, almost to the life. His account had an enormous success in his own time. Lawyers, journalists, and political philosophers felt the impact of the acquittal as something new, either hopeful or foreboding, and there sprang up a market for the text in both America and England. Other editions began to appear to meet the demand, several of them published in London as early as 1738. The eighteenth century, when the problems involved were still fighting issues, was the golden age of Zenger republication. One of these versions, that issued by J. Almon of London in 1765, is generally available today in the form of a reprint prepared by the Work Projects Administration and sponsored by the California State Library for its series of “Occasional Papers” (1940). The nineteenth century saw two particularly useful editions in T. B. Howell’s _State Trials_ (1816) and in Peleg W. Chandler’s _American Criminal Trials_ (1841), the first following Alexander almost word for word, the second modified and abridged. With the turn of the century Livingston Rutherfurd made available a literal reprint of the _Brief Narrative_ in his _John Peter Zenger, His Press, His Trial and a Bibliography of Zenger Imprints_ (1904). Fifty years later Frank Luther Mott did the same for our generation in _Oldtime Comments on Journalism_ (1954). The first edition of any text (putting aside the corrupt or otherwise unreliable) always has a presumption in its favor. This is how the author saw his own work; this is the form in which he cast his own thoughts; this is the union of his own logic with his own rhetoric. Nothing else can begin to approach the authority and authenticity of his imprimatur. Consequently it is mandatory for later editors to justify tampering with the text instead of simply reproducing it.