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Chapter 29: Book publishers and publishing
The history of book publishing in
British North America begins with 1640, when
Stephen Daye printed at
Cambridge The Bay psalm Book, the first real book to issue from a press north of
Mexico.
Daye continued to print for only about seven or eight years, when he was succeeded by
Samuel Green, for causes known only to the authorities of Harvard College, under whose direction this first American press was operated.
Back of
Harvard stood the more or less arbitrary authority of the Crown, exercised against publication in more than one colony through some ultra-conservative governor or council.
In fact not until about twenty-one years before the Revolution were legal restrictions removed from publishing in the colony where it was born.
These restrictions, in the case of
Massachusetts, were largely motivated by religion; and the early issues of the press were almost entirely religious in character.
The first monument of American scholarship and printing ability, for instance, is
The Holy Bible . . . translated into the Indian language,
Cambridge, 1663. Six years later from the same press appeared what seems to be our first original book not strictly religious in character,
Nathaniel Morton's
New England's Memorial.
Moreover this work announces that it is ‘Printed for
H. Usher of
Boston.’
Urian Oakes's
Elegie upon the death of the Reverend Mr. Thomas Shepard,
1 in some respects the best poem produced in the colonies before the eighteenth century, dates from 1677.
As early as 1693, at least, book dealers had begun to sell private libraries, for in that year appeared
The Library of the late Reverend and learned Mr. Samuel Lee . . .
