The Printer of Harvard's Humble Proposal (1659)
Bertram C. Cooper and Richard E.
Hasker
ABROADSIDE, An Humble Proposal, for the
Inlargement of University Learning in New England,
by the Trustees hereafter named, to whom the
management of this Affair is committed,
printed in 1659 for the purpose of raising funds in
England for Harvard College, is listed by Evans in his American Bibliography as the
work of the Cambridge Press in Massachusetts,[1] but Winship, without stating his
evidence, assigns the printing to England.[2] Dr. Lawrence Starkey has called
attention to the fact that neither the factotum nor the
type used in the Humble Proposal is
to be found in other products of the Cambridge Press,
although the watermark in the paper on which it is printed
is also found in paper used by this
colonial press in its books at approximately the same
time.
[3] This last is an interesting
coincidence which, if taken alone, might lend support to
Evans' opinion that the broadside was published in
America. However, the more important evidence of the
factotum may now be utilized to demonstrate the
correctness of Winship's assignment of the printing to an
English press.
The factotum is a conventional design measuring 59 x 60 mm. At
the top a column, centered over the mortise, is placed
between two cherubim, below each of which is a cornucopia,
the one on the left of the mortise being topped by a
stylized rose, the other by a thistle. At the bottom a
fleur-de-lis directly beneath the mortise separates
arabesques which extend upward and interwine with the
cornucopias. Finally, the whole design is surrounded by
double lines, the outer much thicker than the other. In
his study of the ornament stock of Thomas Newcombe, Dr. C.
William Miller has reproduced this factotum and identified
it as belonging to the stock that came to Newcombe in 1648
when he married Ruth Raworth, the widow of the printer
John Raworth.[4] The reproduction, no. 3
in Dr. Miller's set of illustrations, is taken from The Compleat Ambassador (Wing
D1453), by Dugley Digges, which Newcombe printed in 1655
for Gabriel Bodell and Thomas Collins. When four years
later the factotum appears in the Humble
Proposal (1659), a conspicuous crack, not
present in the earlier occurrence, is to be found at the
top just off-center right in the heavy outer line.
Mr. John Wyllie, Curator of Rare Books at the University of
Virginia Library, has called our attention to the use of
the same factotum in two official documents; (1) An Act for Confirming Publick
Acts (comprising signatures D and E
immediately following signature C of Wing E994 in the ViU
MacGregor set of Charles II Statutes), dated May 8, 1661;
and (2) the ViU copy of A Proclamation
of Grace, for the Inlargement of Prisoners called
Quakers (Wing C3523), dated May 11, 1661.
Though both bear the imprint of John Bill and Christopher
Barker, the King's Printers, identity of detail and the
presence of the break in the upper edge prove that these
publications contain the same factotum used by Newcombe
and the printer of the Humble
Proposal (1659). The latest use of the
factotum Miller records is in The Works
of Richard Hooker (Wing H2631), which Newcombe
printed in 1666. In all of these later appearances there
is a noticeable deterioration of the edges of the
mortise.
Mr. Wyllie has also found that the precise book in which the
crack in the edge of the factotum first occurred is John
Rushworth's Historicall
Collections, which George Thomason entered in the Stationers' Register on
September 14, 1658, and which Newcombe printed for him in
1659, the
same year in which the
Humble Proposal was printed. On
B1
r of this book the line
around the factotum is unbroken, but on A2
r in the preliminaries, which were
undoubtedly machined last, there is present the crack
noted in the 1659 broadside and in all subsequent
publications containing the factotum.
[5] From this evidence it is apparent
that the printing of the
Historicall
Collections was finished before May 11, 1659,
the date of the
Humble Proposal,
and that the factotum had been cracked between that date
and the preceding September.
Newcombe's ownership of the factotum can easily be reconciled
with its appearance in the two 1661 documents which have
the Bill and Barker imprints. According to Plomer, John
Bill and Christopher Barker, who were reinstated as King's
Printers in 1660, did not themselves print the books whose
imprints bear their names, but farmed them out to their
assigns.[6] Furthermore, Newcombe,
as an assign of John Bill, was the printer and manager of
the King's Printing Office from the Restoration until
1677, when he and Henry Hills were appointed King's
Printers.[7] This association, then,
explains the presence of the Newcombe factotum in An Act for Confirming Publick
Acts (1661) and A
Proclamation of Grace (1661), both of which
Newcombe must have printed himself.
The constant appearance of the factotum in Newcombe books
identifies him as the printer of the Humble Proposal in 1659. The only
alternative, that the factotum was loaned to the Cambridge
Press to print the broadside and then returned to London,
is sheer fantasy. Its appearance in the books discussed
above is therefore sufficient proof that Winship was
correct in denying the Humble
Proposal to the Cambridge Press and assigning
it to England.
Notes
