Since being deposited at the Boston Public Library in 1866, the Prince collection has suffered no further erosion, though in the fall of 1991, Old South Church parishioners quietly debated whether they should sell one of their two remaining Bay Psalm Books. Coincidentally, the discussion was held while a Thomas Prince exhibition—including the two remaining copies of The Whole Booke of Psalmes—was on view across Boylston Street in the Boston Public Library. Because a copy has not been sold in more than fifty years, and since the prospect of another appearing on the market ever again is remote, some auctioneers feel that presale estimates would range from $1.5 million to $4 million—a lot of money for an inner-city church with many programs to support.
“The suggestion that we sell one of our Bay Psalm Books comes up periodically,” the Reverend James W. Crawford said when I asked him to confirm rumors about the proposed sale. “The Prince collection is important to us, but it is not a function of the church to be a museum, and the church is not necessarily wedded to these books. So to answer your question, yes, there was a meeting of the congregation, and the matter was discussed at length. Some good questions were asked, but we reached no conclusions.”
In any case, the deaccessioning of duplicates has a long tradition, and any decision the Old South Church might make to sell its second copy would not be without precedent. For instance, William A. Jackson, the Houghton librarian at Harvard, once sold an exceptional copy of Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans to the private collector Robert H. Taylor because the Houghton Library had another copy. Henry E. Huntington’s frenetic campaign in the early 1900s to buy up entire collections brought in hundreds of duplicates, known as surplusage, including two copies of Poe’s Tamerlane. One of them was sold in a series of fifteen sales specifically organized to sell off Huntington’s extra material. The man many regard as the greatest book collector of his generation, William H. Scheide of Princeton, New Jersey, acquired a 1457 Mainz Psalter, one of the rarest printed books in the world, by proposing a trade with the Bibilothèque Nationale, which had a second copy. Collectors, in short, not only preserve knowledge, they disseminate it. Because Thomas Prince was bent on recovering Bay Psalm Books, scholars today at the Boston Public Library, Yale University, the New York Public Library, the John Carter Brown Library, and the Library of Congress have access to this vital artifact of America’s past.
Also of great significance was the example Thomas Prince set for a new generation of collectors. Jeremy Belknap, a member of the Old South Church parish, was fourteen years old when his pastor, Prince, died in 1758. Like Prince, the precocious youngster professed an “inquisitive disposition in historical matters,” and like Prince he went to Harvard College and trained for the ministry. Soon after accepting a church appointment in New Hampshire, Belknap began searching for anything that would help him understand local history. He recalled spending hours on end “in the garrets and rat-holes of old houses,” reading musty manuscripts. “I am willing even to scrape a dunghill, if I may find a jewel at the bottom.” By enduring such unpleasantness, he was able to produce his History of New Hampshire, a three-volume work William Cullen Bryant later accorded “the high merit of being the first to make American history attractive.”
Belknap conceived an even grander plan when he returned to Boston and became pastor of what is now the Arlington Street Church. On August 26, 1790, he proposed formation of an “antiquarian society” that would “collect and communicate” American history “from the earliest times to the present day.” On January 24, 1791, the Massachusetts Historical Society was formed with high purpose: “The preservation of books, pamphlets, manuscripts and records, containing historical facts, biographical anecdotes, temporary projects and beneficial speculations” that could be used “to mark the genius, delineate the manners, and trace the progress of society in the United States,” thereby working “to rescue the true history of this country from the ravages of time and the effects of ignorance and neglect.”
Though the organization was named the Massachusetts Historical Society, Belknap was interested in much more than a single state, and for thirteen years, until formation of the New-York Historical Society in 1804, he had a clear field. “We intend to be an active, not a passive, literary body; not to lie waiting, like a bed of oysters, for the tide to flow in upon us, but to see and find, to preserve and communicate, literary intelligence, especially in the historical way,” Belknap wrote Ebenezer Hazard, the first corresponding member of the society, in February 1791. Four years later, as he anticipated the acquisition of some major documents, he wrote again: “There is nothing like having a good repository, and keeping a lookout, not waiting at home for things to fall into the lap, but prowling about like a wolf for the prey.”
Belknap was a relentless collector who wore people down. After repeated requests, Paul Revere finally agreed in 1798 to write out in longhand his recollections of the celebrated midnight ride. John Hancock decided that after his death Belknap should have first choice in his library. The son of Connecticut’s wartime governor, Jonathan Trumbull, chose the society as recipient of his father’s papers “in preference to a Collegiate or other Library, where they probably would soon become ‘Food for Worms.’” Belknap also drafted a “Circular Letter of the Historical Society” that he sent throughout the United States and Europe requesting documentary material. After his death, gifts continued to come in. One early acquisition was a manuscript copy of the Declaration of Independence in Thomas Jefferson’s hand. Another was the handwritten draft of George Washington’s answer to a demand made by disgruntled members of the Continental army for back pay and better pension benefits known as the Newburgh Address. Washington delivered his response to senior officers at his winter headquarters in Newburgh, New York, on March 15, 1783. His calming words, written neatly on both sides of six sheets of paper, are credited with averting hostile action against the Continental Congress by the angry soldiers.
From the beginning, Belknap stressed another purpose beyond accumulation: the publication of what he had gathered. When Thomas Jefferson heard about the novel idea, he responded
with great satisfaction that you are about committing to the Press the valuable and Historical and State Papers you have been so long collecting. Time and accident are committing daily havoc on the originals deposited in our public offices; the late war has done the work of centuries in this business; the lost cannot be recovered; but let us save what remains; not by vaults and locks, which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of Copies as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.
Within a year, Belknap’s son Joseph, a Boston printer, was issuing a weekly newspaper with a page devoted to Historical Society material. Belknap’s enterprise continues to this day with a project now under way that will occupy a team of scholars well into the twenty-first century: the Adams Family Papers, the editing and publication of documents relating to four generations of Adamses. “The art of printing affords a mode of preservation more effectual than Corinthian brass or Egyptian marble,” Belknap wrote two centuries ago, echoing Jefferson: “There is no sure way of preserving historical records and materials, but by multiplying the copies.”
As Belknap and his colleagues prowled the countryside for fresh prey, a prosperous entrepreneur forty miles away in Worcester embarked on a quixotic mission of his own. Jeremy Belknap and Thomas Jefferson touted printing as the most practical way to preserve historic material, but little suggests they saw it as anything more than a sensible means to achieve a worthwhile end. Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831), on the other hand—fiery patriot, successful printer, and able chronicler of his craft— found the printing process as inspirational as the product, a sacred operation he declared to be “the preserver of all art.”
Born in poverty, Isaiah Thomas came to know the touch and smell of ink on paper when he was a child. Only nine years old in 1758, the year Thomas Prince died, young Thomas was already completing hi
s third year of apprenticeship in the dingy Boston shop of Zechariah Fowle. While Jeremy Belknap was looking forward to his Harvard education, this son of an itinerant ne’er-do-well set type for such broadside ballads as “The Lawyer’s Pedigree,” an off-color ditty sung to the tune of “Our Polly Is a Sad Slut.” When he later became the most successful printer and publisher in the United States—Benjamin Franklin dubbed him the Baskerville of America—Isaiah Thomas enjoyed telling friends that he knew how to set type before he was able to read.
Thomas left Fowle’s shop when he was sixteen and spent five years mastering his chosen trade in Nova Scotia, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Bermuda before returning to Boston in 1770. That summer, the twenty-one-year-old firebrand established The Massachusetts Spy, a popular but contentious newspaper that quickly led British Loyalists to mark him as a troublemaker. On April 16, 1775, heeding the urgent advice of friends, Thomas dismantled the press he would always call “Number One” and shipped it under cover of darkness by wagon to Worcester. Two nights later, he helped Paul Revere and the Committee for Public Safety warn the residents of Middlesex County that British troops were on the march. After shots were exchanged in the villages of Lexington and Concord, Thomas gathered his equipment and set up shop. The May 3, 1775, issue of his Massachusetts Spy carried the first newspaper report of the portentous battles under a piercing headline: “Americans!—Liberty or Death!—Join or Die!”
At war’s end, Thomas stayed in Worcester and used the community as a base for what became the most successful operation of its kind in the young republic, one that counted print shops, newspapers, publishing houses, a bindery, bookstores, even a paper mill, among its holdings. “He spread his products over the entire nation, catered to every taste, and established himself in every field of printing,” Clifford K. Shipton wrote in a summary of Thomas’s activities. “A great part of the American people learned their letters from his primers, got their news from his papers, sang from his hymnals, ordered their lives by his almanacs, and read his novels and Bibles. It was genius as well as opportunity which made him the first American capitalist of the printing business, for some of the rivals of his youth died in their old age in little one-room shops like that in which he began.”
Yet for all his success, Isaiah Thomas is remembered today not so much for what he accomplished in business as for his hobby: the history of printing. He founded the American Antiquarian Society, the first example of a peculiarly American institution, an independent research library formed through the will, the taste, the passion, and the eccentricities of a private collector. (Other examples are the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City, the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California, and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.) By 1808—the year he bought an Eliot Indian Bible for seven dollars— he was collecting in earnest. Everywhere Thomas went he procured the kinds of materials that today are called ephemera: ferry tickets, almanacs, pamphlets, broadsides, posters, hundreds upon hundreds of newspapers. In his diary for 1808 he mentions numerous visits to the Historical Society in Boston and the “Old South Library in the steeple.”
One of his favorite ploys was to visit the offices of Colonial and Revolutionary newspapers and buy up all the back files he could find. His entry for the sixty-dollar purchase of “old papers, Boston Evening Post, nearly complete” is followed by an account of a full week spent “in search of Old Boston printed Books and in purchasing Old files of papers for them.” He also took out newspaper notices asking printers to send him copies of their work.
Exactly when Isaiah Thomas decided to write a history of his profession is not certain. Published in 1810, his two-volume History of Printing in America earned widespread praise, and is the standard reference on the subject. Instead of concluding his search on that triumphant note, Thomas pressed on, filling his Court Hill mansion in Worcester with hundreds of additional items. In 1812, the state legislature granted his request to establish an institution to be modeled after the Society of Antiquaries of London. Duly elected first president of the American Antiquarian Society, Isaiah Thomas stated his purpose: “We cannot obtain a knowledge of those, who are to come after us, nor are we certain what will be the events of future times; as it is in our power, so it should be our duty, to bestow on posterity that, which they cannot give to us, but which they may enlarge and improve, and transmit to those who shall succeed them. It is but paying a debt we owe to our forefathers.”
Thomas donated his collection—then about eight thousand books— to the Antiquarian Society, but because no building was immediately available, everything stayed in his house. With exceptional foresight, he also kept adding more material. In 1813, his diary records the purchase of 302 broadside ballads from Nathaniel Coverly, then the largest dealer of sheet music in Boston. Thomas bought copies of the full inventory not because he enjoyed bawdy songs, but “to show what articles of this kind are in Vogue with the Vulgar at this time.” Bound in three large volumes, they offer uncommon insight into how people amused themselves in the early nineteenth century. “No other American library can offer anything like it for the period,” Worthington C. Ford wrote of the Antiquarian Society collection, “and all other libraries combined would still hardly be able to match the contents of these volumes.”
The following year Thomas scored a major coup, the purchase of fourteen hundred books owned by three generations of Mathers—Richard, Increase, and Cotton. Other notable acquisitions he turned over to the society include William Hubbard’s 1677 Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-England, a 1660 edition of Massachusetts Laws, and a Bay Psalm Book. Inside the front cover Thomas noted how “after advertising for another copy of this book, and making enquiry in many places in New England, I was not able to hear of another.” Thomas Prince, it would seem, had already cornered the market.
A proposal to raise funds for permanent quarters by means of a state lottery was rejected by the legislature, prompting Thomas to buy a site in Worcester and erect a building with his own money. On August 16, 1820, the proud founder recorded how a crew “began to remove the American Antiquarian Society Library from my house to the new Edifice for the Library,” a transfer that continued for eight more days. On June 23, 1828, his diary has a simple notation: “cut the Grass at A.A.S. Library.” He remained active in the society’s affairs until his death three years later at the age of eighty-two. Thomas’s grandson, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, wrote forty years later that his grandfather was “touched early by that gentlest of infirmities, bibliomania.”
Beyond the directive to gather “books of every description including pamphlets and magazines, especially those which were early printed either in South or in North America,” Isaiah Thomas left an even greater legacy. “He gave the society its intellectual vigor,” Marcus A. McCorison, who retired in 1992 as AAS president, librarian, and director, pointed out. “He recruited people from all over the United States to collect for the society.”
One early bequest in an odd way helped the society refine its focus— by not becoming a permanent part of the collection. In 1816, Charles Wilkins of Lexington, Kentucky, donated the remains of a “desiccated mummy” found in an Indian burial ground on his property. “For myself, I cannot perceive how the cause of science, history or antiquarianism is to be benefited by the preservation of these dried up particles,” one of the original incorporators complained in a letter to Thomas. “The best thing in my opinion which could be done with it would be to give it to some anatomical school or bury it in the cemetery.” Sixty years later, the mummy was displayed at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, then was given to the Smithsonian Institution.
With one notable exception, the legacy Isaiah Thomas left is a library of American history, not a museum that displays trinkets and curiosities. Old “Number One,” the English common press hauled into Worcester on the eve of rebellion in 1775, is still displayed prominently in the society’s Antiquarian Hall.
In orga
nizing the American Antiquarian Society at Worcester, Isaiah Thomas reasoned that an inland location would provide “better preservation from the destruction so often experienced in large cities and towns by fire, as well as from the ravages of any enemy, to which seaports in particular are so much exposed in time of war.” The War of 1812 raged as he wrote those words, and barely six months later an American military column invaded York, the capital city of Upper Canada now known as Toronto, and set the Parliament building on fire, destroying the provincial archives and library. When British troops captured Washington on August 24, 1814, they retaliated by putting the United States Capitol to the torch and destroying the Library of Congress.
After reading about the disaster in newspaper accounts, Thomas Jefferson declared the loss a “triumph of vandalism over knowledge itself,” and resolved to move on an idea he previously thought could wait until after his death. On September 21, 1814, the man who would later confess to John Adams that he “cannot live without books” wrote a long letter to Samuel H. Smith, an old friend who at that time was the Commissioner of Revenue. In the course of the letter, he proposed the sale of his great library, a collection he had spent “fifty years making” and had “spared no pains, opportunity or expense” to perfect. Jefferson mentioned the years he served as minister to France, recalled how he spent his afternoons “examining all the bookstores, turning over every book,” and buying “everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science.” Moreover, he had issued “standing orders during the whole time” he was in Europe with the “principal book-marts, particularly Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Madrid and London, for such works relating to America as could not be found in Paris.”
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Page 19
