"There are some men will run down the most elaborate peices only because they had none of their Midwifery to bring them into public View and yet shall give the greatest encomiums to the most Nauseous trash when they had the hap to be concerned in it."
But Browning would promote a good book whoever printed it. Mr. Campbell, the third book-dealer, was "very industrious, dresses All-a-mode and I am told a young lady of Great Fortune is fallen in love with him." Of Mr. Usher, the remaining book-trader, Dunton asserts:
"He makes the best figure in Boston. He is very rich, adventures much to sea, but has got his Estate by Book selling."
Usher was a book-maker, undertaker, and adventurer, doubtfully attractive or desirable appellations nowadays; but what higher praise could have been given in colonial tongue? He would have angrily resented being dubbed a publisher; that name was assigned to and monopolized by the town-crier. Usher died worth £20,000, a tidy sum for those days.
Happy, indeed, were all the Boston book-sellers; blessed of the gods! rich, witty, modish, beloved, beautiful! The colony was sixty years old, opulent, prosperous, and fashionable; but a book-seller cut the best figure. Surely the book trade had in Boston a glorious ushering in, a golden promise which has not yet deserted it.
Book-printing, too, was a highly honored calling. The first machine for the craft and mystery of printing was set up at Cambridge in 1639, and for twenty-three years the president of Harvard College was responsible for its performances. Then official licensers were appointed to control its productions, and not till a decade of years before the Declaration of Independence were legal restraints removed from the colonial press.
The first printer in the colony, Steeven Daye, was about as bad a printer as ever lived, as his work in the Bay Psalm-Book proves; and he spent a term in Cambridge jail, and was altogether rather trying in his relations with the godly ministers who were associated with him in his printery. The second printer had to sleep in a cask after he landed, but he died with a fortune, a true forerunner of the self-made men of America. The third printer, Johnson, having a wife in England, was "brought up" and bound over before the court not to seduce the affections of the daughter of printer No. 2. The next Bostonians who tried their hands at the mechanical part of book-making--the printing and binding--were two of the most prominent citizens; Captain Green, a worthy man, the father of nineteen children by one wife and eleven by another, and rich, too, in spite of the thirty Green olive-branches; and Judge Sewall, also, as Cotton Mather said, "edified and beautified with many children"--fourteen in all. Truly, book-making did prosper a man mightily both at home and abroad in colonial days.
