Of all the personalities involved in the Zenger case, none eludes investigation so much as the man who gave his name to it. There are irritating lacunae in the biography of John Peter Zenger, and no artist ever found him worthy of sketch or portrait (at least none has survived), so that we do not even know his face. But this lack of information is by no means crippling to the historian of the period. If we would prefer to know more about Peter Zenger, the plain truth is that half a dozen other men were of more consequence than he in the establishment of a free press in New York. He was neither the editor of his newspaper nor even a principal writer for it during its great days; his function hardly went beyond that of the mere printer. He became famous almost by accident, famous as a symbol rather than as a motivating force. We can, therefore, “place” him with the less difficulty, and the data to hand are sufficient for that. He was a German immigrant, a native of the Rhenish Palatinate, where he was born in 1697. His family brought him to the New World in 1710, and that same year he was apprenticed to William Bradford, the only printer then at work in New York, and one of the top men of his trade in the Colonies. Bradford’s establishment was a good school for any apprentice, for it graduated a whole series of printers who became famous in their own right, the best remembered of whom was the master’s son, Andrew Bradford, who competed with Benjamin Franklin for the publishing trade in Philadelphia. Peter Zenger’s indentures were for eight years, during which time he toiled at the Bradford press, beginning at the bottom as a typical ink-stained printer’s devil and working his way up in the profession that Bradford liked to call “the art and mystery of printing.” Peter never became a refined practitioner, for one reason because his grasp of the English language remained defective, but he came out of his training as skilled as many others in the field, and he was obeying a sound instinct when, his indentures up, he decided to strike out for himself as an independent. During the years 1719-22 he wandered through the Colonies looking for a place to set up a permanent business. He married Mary White of Philadelphia, and had a son, John Zenger, who was a printer after him. His most ambitious venture took him to Maryland, where he became a citizen and was granted the right to publish the Colony’s laws, proceedings, minutes, etc. What happened then is uncertain; perhaps it was just that his plans did not work out; perhaps the death of his wife was the crucial thing; for some reason he decided to abandon his Maryland career and return to New York. There he married his second wife, Anna Catherine Maulin, a native of Holland, and settled down for good.