New York's First Printer

JEAN W. ASHTON

A yellowed clipping tucked in the front of Letter of Advice
to a Young Gentleman Leaving the University Concerning
His Behaviour and Conversation in the World by Richard
Lingard (1696), a miniature volume in the Stephen Whitney
Phoenix collection, proclaims this monitory text as "the First
Book printed in New York." On the front endpaper is the inscrip¬
tion "Johannes Robinson Liber 1701"; on the verso is the bold
signamre of the man whose name appears at the bottom of the
title page, the printer William Bradford. The undated clipping
apparendy dates from the early twentieth cenmry, and appended
to it is an advertisement for a facsimile of Lingard's work, printed
by McAuhffe & Bootir in 1907.

Since that time, the appearance of a number of other New York
imprints substantial enough to be clearly designated as books,
rather than pamphlets or broadsides, has rendered the bookseller's
claim inaccurate. The little book and the publisher's confident
signature, however, serve as reminders that 1993 marked the
three-hundredth anniversary of the date when Benjamin Fletcher,
the Royal Governor of New York, following a resolution of the
Provincial Council, fetched from Philadelphia a determined
young printer and allocated to him a salary of forty pounds a year
to run his press. William Bradford, New York's first printer and,
in fact, the only printer in the dry for more than thirty years, set
up his business at "The Sign of the Bible" in Hanover Square in
April 1693, and within a few weeks was producing the public doc¬
uments, laws, declarations, and religious tracts that formed the
mainstay of a colonial printing business. Bradford's perseverance
and independent spirit eventually gave birth to those industries
central to the identity of New York—newspaper journalism and
modern publishing.

In this era of instant news and satellite transmissions, when the
day's events can be reported throughout the world as they occur,
it may be difficult to imagine daily life in a geographically extend-
 

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