It would be possible for a man of the world to be so without ever stirring from the town of his birth, yet oftener than not the man with breadth of interest is a cosmopolitan and a traveller. Such cosmopolitans were fourteen members of the Elzevir[27] family, who, over a period of one hundred and thirty years, engaged in printing and selling small books chiefly intended for poor scholars. This Dutch family of practical internationalists established their bookshops and printing offices in nearly every large city on the continent, from Denmark to Italy, printing their books in Latin and Greek, French and Arabic, on subjects ranging from medicine to political science. All this in spite of the Thirty Years' War, which was to bring about the decline of the artificial internationalism of the Hapsburgs and the Holy Roman Empire, and in spite of similar disturbances before and after.
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the geographical boundaries of printing were extended vastly outside of Europe. The colonization of North and South America was going forward. The first press in America had been established at Mexico City in 1539 by agents of Kromberger of Seville. European printing was carried to India in 1561, to China in 1589, and to Japan in 1591. The first printing was done in Russia in 1563.
Credit for doing the first printing in the American colonies, _The Freeman's Oath_, was once given to Stephen Daye, is sometimes latterly given to his young son, Matthew Daye. Were they more than mechanic, compositor and pressman? Who chose the copy, proofread it, set policies, pushed the work along? Possibly some of the founders of the new Harvard College, or possibly Mrs. Glover, the widow of the man who originated the idea of the press. She was probably a woman of education, since she settled in Cambridge to be near the new college and later married the President, Henry Dunster. She undoubtedly shared her first husband's independent views--he had been suspended from his parsonage in Surrey because of his nonconformity; she might have picked _The Freeman's Oath_ for the first copy. She may have been more of a printer and more of a woman of the world than the fragments of knowledge which we have about her disclose.... Whoever guided the destiny of the first press, it was a person not completely confined by dogma, for the books included almanacs, law books and college thesis lists, as is pointed out by Carl Purington Rollins, himself perhaps our best example of a modern fine printer conscious of what is going on around him.