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The Printing of Jefferson's
Notes, 1793-94
[*]
Coolie Verner
P. J. Conkwright
Mathew Carey[1] came to America from Ireland in 1784, after a brief stay in Paris where he had worked with Benjamin Franklin in his Passy printshop. With the aid of a $400 loan from the Marquis de La Fayette he began his publishing career in Philadelphia. Among his earlier publications were the Pennsylvania Herald, first issued on January 25, 1785; the Columbia Magazine, in October, 1786, with five partners; and in 1792, the first book printed with Greek type in America.[2]
Although he had been a printer in Ireland before fleeing to avoid persecution for political pamphleteering, Carey did not do all of his own printing. When, in 1793, he decided to publish a second American edition of Jefferson's Notes on Virginia [3] in 1,000 copies, he engaged Parry Hall at "149 Chestnut near Fourth" to be the printer.
Hall composed the work in Edmund Fry's Pica Roman No. 1 and Pica Italic No. 2.[4] As soon as he had pulled a proof sheet, he sent it to Jefferson on July 25, 1793, with a note:
So far as can be determined, Jefferson made no textual changes; however, a curious alteration occurred which cannot be attributed specifically to either the author or printer. In all prior editions of the Notes, numbers (in parentheses) had been used to refer to the appended material containing Charles Thomson's comments on various passages in the text. Hall's sheets, however, used upper-case letters[6] in lieu of numbers. This change persists in most of the subsequent editions of the Notes and is an indication of the copy utilized in their composition.[7]
Hall and his daughter are listed among those who died between the first of August and the middle of December in the Philadelphia plague of 1793.[8] Thereafter,
The presswork was probably done on a full sheet imposed eight pages up, in a "work and turn" operation; thus, 750 sheets were printed on one side, and the sheets were then turned and worked on the other side with the same eight pages. Each sheet thus produced two copies of the same signature.[11] Printing was completed by November 10, 1794, and the bill for the job was submitted to Carey.[12] From this bill we can learn the full details of the cost and production of the book. The bill lists the following items:
- To printing 1500 copies Jeffersons Notes on Virginia containing 42 forms and 4 pages 8vo . This means, of course, 336 pages + 4, i.e., 42½ formes or really 43 formes to be charged at press.
- COMPOSITION To 40 forms 6888 m a form &c.mmat; 2/9 a thousand is 19/3 a form 38.10.0 Composition is still computed by the thousand ems. An em is the square of the body of a type. Each text-page of this book required 861 ems, or 6888 ems for the eight-page forme.
- To 2 pages pica 4.9 These are the title, advertisement, and contents pages. Probably the three pages were lumped together and charged as two normal pica pages.
-
To 2 forms long primer 11026 ms a form &c.mmat; 2/9 a
thousand
is 30/3 a form 3.0.6
203These two formes, or 16 pages, are the tables in the text. They average about 1378 ems per page.
- To 2 pages brevier 4752 ms &c.mmat; 2/9 13.9 These are the small footnotes and such matter. They have 2376 ems per page. The composition to this point makes 42 formes plus 4 pages, as totaled above.
- To a table equal to 3 pages long primer 3675 &c.mmat; 2/9 11.0 This was undoubtedly the folding table of Indian Tribes, and represents the cost of composition only.
- PRESSWORK To 43 forms at press each form 6 Tok &c.mmat; 2/9 is 16/6 a form 35.9.6 Since a token is 250 impressions, and the edition was 1500, 6 tokens were required. Paper was no doubt furnished by Carey.[13]
- To presswork of the table 6 Tok 16.6 Although this was a smaller forme than the regular eight pages, it took the pressman just as long to run it; hence there was the same charge as for a regular forme, or 16/6. The total bill was £79.6.0; but since Parry Hall had already worked 1,000 copies of the first three formes, this was deducted from the bill:
- Deduct 4 Tok from each of the 3 first forms is 12 Tok &c.mmat; 2/9 1.13.0 The final bill, then, was £77.13.0. The printing was completed on November 10, 1794, and the imprint dated November 12th. Carey advertised the book as available ". . . in about three or four weeks . . ." in the Philadelphia Gazette of Monday, November 17th. On November 26th he listed the Notes as ". . . neatly bound—1 dollar and a half."
Notes
This study was prepared with the assistance of a grant from the Research Council of the Richmond Area University Center.
For details of the life of Mathew Carey see: L. Bradsher, Mathew Carey, editor, author, and publisher (1912).
A complete copy should collate 8°, A2 B-Uu4, with map in front and a half sheet inserted table of Indian Tribes after S3.
These faces were cut by Isaac Moore, who had been an apprentice to Baskerville (thus the Baskerville characteristics—especially noticeable in the italic Q and J).
Note from Parry Hall to Thomas Jefferson, 25 July 1793, in the Jefferson Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society. The proof sheet accompanying this note has not been found among the Jefferson Papers and one may presume that Jefferson corrected and returned it to the printer.
These letters may be found as follows: (A)—p. 21; (B)—p. 24. In the Appendix containing Thomson's Notes to which they refer, numerals are used in lieu of letters for (A), p. 293, and (B), p. 294, with (B) being misnumbered (1).
In addition to this use of upper-case letters there are errors on P2v (p. 108) and P4v (p. 112) of incorrect totals: "106" for "109" on p. 108, and "21" for "421" on p. 112. For a full listing of subsequent editions containing these errors see Coolie Verner, A Further Checklist of the Separate Editions of Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. Charlottesville: The Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia, 1950.
Mr. Nicholas Wainwright of The Historical Society of Pennsylvania found this data on page 137 of the second impression of John Beale Bordley's Yellow Fever. [Philadelphia, 1794 (?)]
See: Coolie Verner, "Some Observations on the Philadelphia 1794 Edition of Jefferson's Notes," Studies in Bibliography, II (1950), 201-204.
In addition, the spellings "Missisipi" and "Erié" in Hall's run, as opposed to "Mississippi" (generally, though the word occurs twice on p. 1, once "Mississipi") and "Erie" on the thick paper. In the first state B1v, lines 1 and 5, the degree marks are superior figures, whereas in the second state they are made from broken eights. Much of the thin paper is also water-marked A L MASSO, but some is also unwater-marked.
The bound signatures are in 4's, i.e., four leaves or eight pages each. If the book had been printed "sheetwise", that is, four pages to the inner and four pages to the outer formes, 86 separate formes would have been required to produce it. By printing in a "work and turn" method however, only 43 formes are required and this method also yields 8-page signatures.
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