Before 1966 the earliest Massachusetts imprint, as well as the earliest imprint of the Nation, in the Library was Richard Mather's _The Summe of Certain Sermons upon Genes: 15.6_, printed at Cambridge in 1652. Its author was the progenitor of the powerful Mather family of New England divines, and he was among the translators contributing to the _Bay Psalm Book_. Its printer, Samuel Green, operated the first Massachusetts printing press after Stephen Daye's son Matthew died in 1649, Stephen having retired from the press in 1647. Mather's book contains his revised notes for sermons preached at Dorchester.
The Library of Congress copy--one of four extant--is inscribed by an early hand, "James Blake his Booke." In the mid-19th century this copy apparently came into the possession of Henry Stevens, whereupon it was bound in full morocco by Francis Bedford at London; and it presumably belonged to the extensive collection of Mather family books that Stevens sold in 1866 to George Brinley, of Hartford, Conn.[1] The Library of Congress obtained the volume with a $90 bid at the first sale of Brinley's great library of Americana, held at New York in March 1879.
[Footnote 1: See Wyman W. Parker, _Henry Stevens of Vermont_ (Amsterdam, 1963), p. 267-268.]
[Illustration: (_A Collection of All the Acts of Assembly Now in Force, in the Colony of Virginia_ (1733) printed by William Parks)]
A press that William Nuthead started at Jamestown in 1682 was quickly suppressed, and nothing of its output has survived. It was William Parks who established at Williamsburg in 1730 Virginia's first permanent press. Here Parks issued the earliest Virginia imprint now represented in the Library of Congress: _A Collection of All the Acts of Assembly Now in Force, in the Colony of Virginia_ (1733). Printing of this book may have begun as early as 1730. In a monograph on William Parks, Lawrence C. Wroth cites evidence "in the form of a passage from Markland's _Typographia_, which indicates that its printing was one of the first things undertaken after Parks had set up his Williamsburg press."[2]
Two Library of Congress copies of this imposing folio--one of them seriously defective--are housed in the Law Library; while yet another copy, which is especially prized, is kept with the Jefferson Collection in the Rare Book Division since it belonged to the library which Thomas Jefferson sold to the Congress in 1815.[3] The 1815 bookplate of the Library of Congress is preserved in this rebound copy, and Jefferson's secret mark of ownership can be seen--his addition of his other initial to printed signatures I and T. A previous owner wrote "Robert [?] Lewis law Book" on a flyleaf at the end, following later acts bound into the volume and extending through the year 1742. He may well have been the same Robert Lewis (1702-65) who served in the House of Burgesses from 1744 to 1746.[4]