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Notes
*Editor's note: After galley proof had been returned and was in process of paging, Dr. Starkey was so fortunate as to secure information on an eighth copy of the Platform by courtesy of its owner, Mr. Thomas W. Streeter. Although no new variants occur in this copy, some are found in combinations which differ from those in the other seven copies examined. The new evidence thus furnished serves powerfully to confirm Dr. Starkey's original conclusions arrived at, in small part, by another line of bibliographical reasoning which had, although less certainly, disproved the case for half-sheet imposition in the preliminary gathering. It has seemed advisable, therefore, to utilize to the full the evidence of the Streeter copy in a more direct manner than by appending an addendum paragraph. Because of the advanced state of the proof, all necessary mention could not be made in the text proper, although some was possible. For this reason, a certain number of supplementary footnotes have been constructed on evidence communicated by Dr. Starkey to serve as a running commentary to equate the Streeter copy with the discussion in the text of the seven copies which Dr. Starkey had personally examined as a basis for the present article.
Stephen Daye is generally credited with being the first Cambridge printer and with having printed The Whole Booke of Psalmes (Bay Psalm Book) in 1640. Certainly Stephen had some connection with the early Cambridge Press, although there is some doubt that he was ever its compositor: extant letters written by him contain spellings which, even by seventeenth-century standards, indicate that he was hardly more than semi-literate. Stephen's son Matthew was Green's immediate predecessor as Cambridge printer. Matthew's name appears in the imprint of the Almanack for 1647 (published before March, 1647), and he may have done the printing for a number of years before that time, in addition to his work as Steward of Harvard College. He died on 10 May 1649.
George Parker Winship, The Cambridge Press, 1638-1692 (Philadelphia, 1945), p. 113. In the same place Winship states that on 19 October 1649 the General Court called for an edition of 500 copies of the Platform. I have been unable to find any evidence to support this, or that the book was printed at public expense.
Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England, ed. by Nathaniel B. Shurtleff (Boston, 1853), III, 177-78.
The book was entered by Hannah Allen, widow of a London printer who had in 1643 reprinted the lost Cambridge Press broadside of the Capitall Lawes of 1642. What has not hitherto been commented upon is that the well-known London printer, Lodowick Lloyd, soon after entered the same book in the Register on 28 December 1649. Lloyd's entry was deleted, however, probably when the duplication was noted. It seems very unlikely that two manuscripts would have found their way to London within a few days of each other, whereas there is good reason to believe that many copies of each book printed by the Cambridge Press were sent to England. Furthermore, it would have been most unlikely that a ship would have been leaving for England as late as two weeks or so after the 19th of October; the last ship of the year to England usually sailed before the end of September in order to avoid the winter storms.
Daye and Green used this list as the basis for a joint affidavit they rendered to the Middlesex County Court at Cambridge, in a suit brought in 1656 by John Glover, eldest son and heir of the Reverend Jose Glover (who had died at sea in 1638 while bringing the first press to Cambridge), against his step-father, Henry Dunster, first President of Harvard, who had received the profits of the Press until he resigned as President in 1654. The list is in two parts on one sheet, one part compiled by Daye and the other by Green.
George Parker Winship, "A Document Concerning the First Anglo-American Press," The Library, 4th ser., XX (1940), 51-70, transcribed the document and also printed a facsimile. The original is now among the Dunster mss. in the Harvard University Archives.
Only one bookseller is known to have been active in Boston at this time, Hezekiah Usher, who had sold the Almanack for 1647 and the Book of the General Lawes (1648). Two years later in 1651, the Psalmes, the revised version of the Bay Psalm Book, were sold to three booksellers, including Usher.
Three years later, Green charged £9 to print a 7½-sheet quarto, Richard Mather's Summe of Certain Sermons (1652). At this rate, he would have charged about £6 10S to print the Platform.
If the book were printed in an edition of about 550 copies, the books would have been sold to the bookseller for about 8d a copy, or slightly in excess of the penny-a-sheet figure usually charged in England.
Winship's Preliminary Check List of Cambridge, Massachusetts Imprints, 1638-1692 (Boston, 1939), p. 4, lists nine extant copies of the Platform, but it omits the copy in the John H. Scheide Library and erroneously includes one in the Boston Public Library.
Winship has confused the two imprints in his Cambridge Press, p. 113. He lists II as found only in the copy in the John Carter Brown Library and another copy in a private library. Actually II is found in the six copies I have seen other than those in the library of Mr. Thomas W. Streeter and in the John Carter Brown Library, which exhibit state I. I have not been able to examine the Scheide copy. In his earlier Check List, p. 4, Winship also confused the description of this book by listing II as found only in the Huntington copy and I in all others.
The evidence of the Streeter copy of imprint I, in which no period exists after '84' contrasts with the printing of a period in the John Carter Brown imprint I copy to demonstrate the correctness of Dr. Starkey's hypothesis that these particular variants were caused by pulled types during the course of the printing. Clearly, the forme in the Streeter copy of imprint I which preserves the 'h' in 'Eighth' but has lost the period after '84' was later through the press than the forme in the John Carter Brown copy of imprint I, which contains the period as well as the 'h'. The Streeter sheet, therefore, serves as a bridge to copies with imprint II, in which the 'h' has also been pulled. The only modification necessary in the argument is the fact that the type began to loosen earlier than Dr. Starkey originally inferred. In other respects the Streeter title is identical with that of the Brown copy: a plain italic 'G' is found in 'GATHERED', and no 's' appears after 'Tabernacle'. Editor.
Winship advances the theory (Cambridge Press, p. 113) that someone called Green's attention to a deviation from standard printing practice, (i.e. his failure to put the place first in the imprint) while the forme was still on the press, and that the press was stopped to allow a revision to the more customary form of the imprint. Actually the change would have been to a form of imprint which Green never used, i.e. placing his name between the town and region. In my opinion, a more likely explanation is that Green saw for himself, or had called to his attention, the extreme awkwardness of imprint I and stopped his press to revise it to imprint II, which, from then on, remained the form of imprint he used most frequently as long as he was printing unassisted.
That English printers usually placed the city first in their imprints is undeniable. Nevertheless, the conventional seventeenth-century English imprint: 'London. Printed by . . .', is not really a parallel to imprint I. Both states of the imprint in the Platform are deviations from normal London imprint phraseology. From 1656 to 1660 Green used the conventional English imprint four times and at the same time used in other books the form of imprint II; he is not known ever to have used the form of imprint I except in the Platform.
Winship (Cambridge Press, p. 114) wrote: "Opinions differ whether a make-up man with or without experience would be more likely to put the title or the inside four pages on a half-sheet, and with other evidence showing that the printer of this tract was unfamiliar with routine practice, it is futile to guess."
This remark may now be supplemented. The single watermark in the Streeter copy is divided between the third and fourth leaves, a position which also demonstrates the case. Dr. Starkey has, in addition, received information that the two watermarks in the New York Public Library copy conform in position to those in the copy held by the Antiquarian Society. Editor.
The misprint is 'crntrbute', corrected to 'contribute'. Winship lists the error as 'crntrilute' only partially corrected to 'contrilute'. None of the eight copies examined agrees with this description.
Dr. Starkey observes that the precise relationship in point of time of this correction in 6 recto to the correction of the misprint 'im' on 6 verso and the alteration of the imprint is not certain, but that the suggested order gives a proportion of copies roughly approximating those which are preserved in each state. If, on the other hand, the misprint on 6 recto had been observed and corrected before the imprint alteration, no other states would have been produced but only more of the Streeter and fewer of the Virginia-Huntington states would have resulted. The point is an academic one, however, since half-sheet imposition proves to be an impossibility. Editor.
Actually, there is still another, consisting of the immediate perfecting of each sheet the moment after it had been printed. No parallel is known to such a procedure since the problem of offset would be insuperable, and hence it may be dismissed as an impossibility without further consideration.
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