Early American Imprints

Early American Imprints JAMES E. MooNEv HE COMPLETE text of every edition of every book, pamphlet, and broadside printed between 1640 and 1800 in what is now the United States is available to genealogists in every state of the Union and in a large number of foreign countries. This marvel of publishing has taken the original American printed resources of a comparatively small number of libraries and private collections located primarily along the East Coast and has made their contents obtainable at a nearby library in Huntsville, Alabama, or Tempe, Arizona, or Fayetteville, Arkansas, or London or Berlin or Ottawa or Canberra. At least fifteen libraries in Pennsylvania hold this collection and they are spread all over the state. The program to reprint the output of two centuries of the American printing press was started about twenty years ago when the American Antiquarian Society of Worcester, Massachusetts, and the Readex Microprint Corporation of New York City, in the persons of Clifford K. Shipton and Albert Boni, took this monumental step. Shipton. Director of the Society, Archivist of Harvard College, Sibley Editor of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a grand man of clear purpose, had recently completed the thirteenth and last volume of Charles Evans' American Bibliography. This chronologically arranged standard work on the subject of American imprints had its first volume go to press over seventy years ago. Since that time the American Antiquarian Society under Clarence Brigham and Shipton had supported Evans' work in real ways for a third of a century before his death. The Society's collecting and cataloguing policies had been seen as looking always to bibliographical control of the products of the colonial and early national press. Evans had listed about forty thousand titles, and about ten thousand additional items had turned up since Evans went to press. The results of the Shipton-Boni effort started in 1954 and aided by a couple of generations of librarians were added to those of Roger Bristol of the University of Virginia, who -took on with considerable success the massive job of locating and listing those notin-Evans items that had turned up. These additional ten thousand items were also included in the Microprint edition. The form in which this project became available is seen today on the shelves of more than three hundred libraries: about a hundred and thirty T 273 274 The Penns,v1vania Genealogical Magazine boxes, three inches wide, each holding a couple of hundred six - inch by nine-inch cards on each of which are printed in microform up to one hundred pages of the originals. The early subscribers to the edition got these fifty thousand numbers for well under ten thousand dollars or less than twenty cents an item. Now it is possible for a researcher in Tokyo or Vancouver to have right there at his reader an immense number of items that in their original form are in unique copies in libraries half a world away. A dozen years after the publishing of these items began, I succeeded Shipton as editor upon his retirement, completed the remnants of those titles through 1800, the First Series, and continued on with the Second Series which eventually will include in Microprint those American imprints between 1800 and 1820. Al this writing there are available in libraries yet another hundred and thirty boxes of material up to 1812. There is also underway a separate edition of Early American Newspapers in Microprint. One of my early jobs as editor was to make ready for the printer Shipton and Mooney, National Index of American Imprints Through 1800: The Short Title Evans, a listing of these fifty thousand titles alphabetically by author or corporate title. National Index has in its introduction a more detailed description of the program, along with a list of locations, of the sets at the time it went to press. In my half-dozen years as editor of Microprint imprints I was constantly awed by the magnitude and audacity of the work and I remain awed today. My readers may share this awe by going to their library bookshelf and exam ining the National Index, a two-volume, fifty-thousand-title. thousand-page alphabetical presentation of two centuries of American printing. On the eight pages listing Philadelphia as a corporate title, there are ordinances of the city. articles of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, accounts of burials and baptisms of the Baptist Church for the ten years before the Revolution and of Christ Church from 1737 until the end of the century. Also there are cabinet-makers' lists, detailed reports of municipal commit tees, recordings of the activities of fire companies, the Pennsylvania Hospital, the First Troop and Second Troop, the theater, and on and on and on. For the colony and state of Pennsylvania over a thousand items from session laws to Indian commissioners to House journals to courts to councils to citizens. These are in addition to an immense number of Pennsylvania im' prints in English and German; in effect, all there is that was then seen fit to print. Although the list of locations of the sets is out of date, the texts in this trove are not. There they stand on shelves all over the world, the words of Galloway and Pemberton. Franklin and Zubly, Rose and Rush, Todd and Towgood, all there waiting. I wish you all the or of IL