Spotlight on New Acquisitions: Two early works by a prominent American woman printer

By Eric Johnson-DeBaufre, Rare Books and Special Collections Librarian

With the exception of perhaps Gutenberg, the names of printers do not often feature prominently in historical narratives. Even on the title-pages of the books they bring into being, their names—if they appear at all—are generally relegated to the margins. This marginalization may seem obvious and natural since, for many of us, the most salient feature of a book is not its printer or publisher but its author, but it also obscures the important contribution that printers and publishers make to the object we hold in our hand. As generations of book historians never tire of reminding us, authors do not create books only texts.

Making more visible the contributions of these printers and publishers is thus not only vital for book history, it is important for history more generally, especially when the people making them constitute a class frequently excluded from our histories: women. So the Watkinson Library was delighted when two early works by a prominent early American woman printer, Lydia Bailey (1779-1869), became available for acquisition. These two works, interesting in their own right, represent two of Bailey’s earliest printing efforts in a remarkable fifty-three year career as a printer and publisher.

As Leona Hudak makes clear in her indispensable bio-bibliography Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 1639-1820, early America proved to be remarkably hospitable to the growth, albeit temporary, of a field of female printers. This was due more to the constraint of circumstance than to intentional choice, as labor shortages and the demands of the literate “led to relaxation of the customary restraints on woman’s work.”¹ Nevertheless, even within a period more amenable to women working as printers, Lydia Bailey’s career is noteworthy.

Like many of her female printer colleagues, Bailey began her career unexpectedly. On March 18, 1808—when she was not yet thirty years old—Lydia Bailey’s husband Robert died, leaving her to take control of his struggling Philadelphia print shop. Necessity—in the form of her four small children—proved the mother of invention as Bailey began the process of rapidly reinventing herself as a printer despite having had no previous experience in the trade.² Bailey took to the business quickly, paying off her husband’s outstanding debts while also using his connections to establish herself as a major printer for the city of Philadelphia. Unlike so many of her female contemporaries, Bailey did not seek to divest herself of her newfound business responsibility by remarrying. Instead, she continued in the trade and had a career that spanned more than fifty years.³ When she retired in 1861, Lydia Bailey had trained more than forty men in the art of printing and had earned sufficient respect to become the official printer of the city of Philadelphia, a position she held for more than thirty years. She was the only woman to hold this position.⁴

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Among the first works that Bailey printed was a popular children’s story by Edward Augustus Kendall titled Keeper’s Travels in Search of His Master, first published in 1798 by another woman printer—an English one—Elizabeth Newbery (1745/6-1821).⁵ The book concerns the misadventures of the dog Keeper, who inadvertently loses his unnamed master during their visit to a Gloucestershire market. Eventually master and dog are reunited and Keeper’s last and beloved rescuer, Caroline, and the dog’s master decide to marry in order to avoid causing Keeper pain by removing him from her custody. Kendall’s sentimental story proved wildly popular and was frequently reprinted in the 19th century.

Although the title-page of the book does not bear her name, it does appear in a colophon which also provides the address of her shop for the benefit of future customers. Bailey’s decision to print Keeper’s Travels at the outset of her career demonstrates her good business sense, as the popularity of the work ensured her a dependable return on investment. Nevertheless, the book itself also reveals a woman still in the process of mastering her craft as it contains some inconsistencies in its lineation, especially in the lay-out of chapter divisions, where the spacing can differ by as much as 5 millimeters.

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One year later, Bailey brought out a new edition of poems—published in two volumes and bound, depending on preference, in either sheep or calf— that Philip Freneau had published during the Revolutionary War. A special feature of the Watkinson’s new copy of the Poems is that it is a presentation copy from Freneau to his brother-in-law Samuel Forman.

As the title-page makes clear, Freneau had already published two previous editions of these poems: the first done in 1786 by Bailey’s father-in-law Francis; and the second in 1795, which Freneau had self-published at his press in New Jersey.

Whether motivated by considerations of charity—Bailey, as previously mentioned, was a newly widowed woman with four small children—or by vanity—Freneau’s self-published second edition has been described as very “poorly done,” with whole lines of text missing altogether—Freneau engaged Bailey as the printer for what he came to regard as the authoritative edition of these poems.⁷ A comparison of Freneau’s 1809 Poems with Kendall’s 1808 Keeper’s Travels demonstrates Bailey’s considerable growth as a typographer. That this growth occurred in a year’s time suggests the seriousness with which she applied herself to mastering her craft. Certainly she was aided in this by Freneau, who remained in Philadelphia that August to supervise the reprinting of Poems; but elsewhere she was no doubt guided only by her own talent and desire to distinguish herself.⁸

If the list of subscribers is any indication, Bailey’s publication of Freneau’s Poems proved to be both a financial and promotional success. Headlining the list of subscribers were the current and former Presidents of the United States: James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the latter a noted bibliophile and the former setting himself down for ten copies. Although Pennsylvanians make up the vast majority of the subscribers on the last six pages of volume one, the list includes substantial numbers of men, some of them quite prominent, from New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina. Through the publication of Freneau’s Poems, Lydia Bailey circulated her name and her reputation far beyond Philadelphia, something she would continue to do over the course of her long career, a career that not only outlasted Gutenberg but many of her male contemporaries.

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Notes

1. Leona M. Hudak, Early American Women Printers and Publishers, 1639-1820 (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1978), p. 1.
2. Idem, p. 613.
3. Karen Nipps, “Bailey, Lydia R.” in Dictionary of American Biography, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 893.
4. Ibid.
5. For a biography of Elizabeth Newbery, who like her uncle by marriage John Newbery, published a large volume of children’s literature see vol. 40 of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds. (Oxford: Oxford university Press, 2004), pp. 57-71.
6. Colophon is a term that originally comes from manuscript culture but carried over into printing. Prior to the printed book, scribes would end a manuscript text with a statement indicating when and where the manuscript had been produced and perhaps also naming the scribe. Early printers, like Gutenberg, retained this practice and it persisted to varying degrees among later printers, although a preference for placing such information on a title-page began to reveal itself as early as the late 15th century. For more information on colophons and title-pages see the entries for them in Michael F. Suarez, S. J. and H. R. Woudhuysen, The Oxford Companion to the Book, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
7. For the description of Freneau’s second edition of Poems see Jacob Blanck, ed., Bibliography of American Literature, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), p. 249. For an account of the republication of the poems see William Peden, “Jefferson, Freneau, and the Poems of 1809,” The New Colophon 1 (Oct. 1948): 394-400. Peden accepts, somewhat uncritically, in my opinion, Freneau’s claim—made in a letter to his former Princeton classmate James Madison—that “the republication of these poems…was not a business of my own seeking or forwarding” (395). Disclaiming a desire for publication is a trope as old as publication itself.
8. Ibid.