Books always played an important part in educating many of those interested in any sort of learning in the colonies.  By 1776, in any case, there existed more than sixty subscription libraries in America, though nearly all of them north of the Mason-Dixon Line, and many of the provincial leaders had acquired huge collections.  King Carter’s library was by then easily exceeded by that of Thomas Jefferson, with a collection of two thousand volumes.  Even larger were the libraries of James Logan of Philadelphia and Cotton Mather of Boston, each of whom owned over three thousand books, while William Byrd II of Virginia had accumulated nearly four thousand volumes.

Considering this heavy emphasis on book learning, the colonial output of bound volumes was strikingly small, and very few works of any lasting significance were produced during the entire period.  The longer and more popular items, especially in New England, tended to be religious works, like the Bay Psalm Book of 1640, or school books like the New England Primer.  Other leading sellers usually included practical handbooks like John Tennent’s Every Man His Own Doctor, and William Bradford’s business manual Young Secretary’s Guide.  Because the colonies possessed so many legislatures, a largely untrained judiciary, and few trained lawyers, legal handbooks were always in great demand.  Fiction, however, was practically non-existent.  Thus the stock of a typical  Boston book seller in 1685 consisted of 390 school books, almost certainly every one of them with a highly religious content; 310 volumes on religion-related subjects; 55 Bibles and Testaments; 50 textbooks on navigation, 36 on law;  and a total of 21 on history, medicine, soldering and romance.

Printing had gotten off to an early, if shaky, start in America.  By 1639 already, newcomer Stephen Day had pulled the first proof from a printing press – an oath to be taken by freemen of the Bay Colony.  Within another year followed an almanac and the Puritan Bay Psalm Book.  But thirty years later, Governor Berkeley of Virginia immortalized himself by openly thanking God for the absence of printing presses in his colony.  Their governors did not boast of it, but the Carolinas, Maryland, New York and the Jerseys were still equally untainted by printer’s ink.

Though printing presses, almanacs and newspapers had begun to spread throughout the colonies before the end of the first century, it still proved a precarious livelihood.  The primitive, hand-powered, screw-pressure presses hardly differed from Gutenberg’s original of the days of Columbus’ youth;  they and the type had to be imported from England until the 1760s.  With few or no assistants at all, the printer assembled the letters by hand, word for word, line for line, and then with muscle power worked the pages through the press.  However great his pride in performing so indispensable a function might have been, his cumbersome craft seldom yielded more than a bare living, and usually the printer was forced to deal in general merchandise as well – stationary, imported books, even such totally unrelated articles as soap or tea, patent medicines, compasses, fur hats.  If he stood well with the provincial or royal authorities, he might also add to this income by serving as the local postmaster.  Otherwise he printed government proclamations, laws and license forms;  for shipowners he produced manifests and bills of lading;  for men of ideas and inspiration he published their pamphlets and interminably succeeding pamphlets replying to pamphlets replying to previous pamphlets.  And as journalism developed and occasion demanded, he began printing a newspaper, and almost always he compiled and printed an almanac. Every type of printed matter grew in profusion, but the hard-bound book never flourished.

Everything conspired to keep most colonial printers from undertaking extensive volumes.  First of all, there was a scarcity of type.  In England the supply had long been limited as part of the control of the press; a statute of 1637 allowed only four type-foundries to produce limited quantities at any one time.  Subsequently, most of what eventually reached the American colonies was likely to consist of fonts long used and already discarded by English printers. So bad was the type in the 1770s, that when Benjamin Franklin received copies of a Boston newspaper sent to him in France, he said the only thing he could see clearly in them was that American printers desperately needed new equipment.  “If you should ever have any secrets that you wish to be well kept, get the printed in those Papers,” quipped Mr. Franklin.

Thus the number of pages a printer could afford to keep set in type for any length of time depended directly on the amount of type he owned.  Most colonial printers, however, were forced to set a few sheets, print them, and then reassemble the type before they were able to proceed.  A rush order for some advertising or for legal or commercial forms – which usually were the backbone of his business – might at any time require the use of his type.  Most printers, therefore preferred small jobs which were quickly finished and which repaid his investment immediately.  Books, which involved complicated type setting, and whose market was always uncertain, were rarely a profitable proposition.

Both the scarcity and the poor quality of paper were another deterrent to book printing.  such paper as was made in the colonies, while barely tolerable for newspaper and pamphlets, was not fit for any book which was expected to last for even a few years.  Paper for books thus had to be ordered from London, and even then it was often impossible to secure enough paper of the same quality for an entire book.  Since no printer could afford to keep his small quantity of type standing until enough paper for the whole work had arrived, he was usually forced to set as much of the book as he had paper available; then he stored the printed sheets and redistributed the type until the arrival of more paper allowed him to go on again.

As a result, everything the colonial printers produced bore the mark of their crude equipment and scarce materials.  Since economy induced many to save additional paper by using the smallest type feasible, few books were ever pleasing to the eye.  The results were such volumes as the 1748 Mennonite Book of Martyrs, Der Blutige Schauplatz, which, with its 756 leaves, had not only the distinction of being the largest book ever published in the colonies, but was reputedly the ugliest as well.  Still, under such conditions it is remarkable that colonial printers succeeded in producing any books at all.