He Stole It Out of Boston — Isaiah Thomas
The press weighs several hundred pounds. It is a 1747 London-built wooden common press, oak and iron, and it has to come apart in sections to move. The type cases are lead. The ink balls are horsehair and leather. The paper is too heavy to carry and there is no time anyway. It is midnight on April 16, 1775, and the British garrison is three blocks away and the man taking this press apart in the dark has been printing sedition on it for five years and they know exactly where it is.
It is 1775.
He does not just print a newspaper. He builds the Massachusetts Spy into the most widely read Patriot paper in the colony, a sheet that John Hancock calls essential and that the British call a sedition foundry, and he runs it openly out of a shop in Boston until the night he cannot run it there anymore.
He does not just move the press. He dismantles it in darkness, rows it across the Charles River in a flatboat, carts it fifty miles west to Worcester on a muddy spring road, reassembles it in a blacksmith’s basement, and on May 3, 1775, prints the first published American account of what happened at Lexington and Concord, on a press he stole out of Boston three days before the war began.
He does not just print the news of the Revolution. He prints the first American novel, the first American Mother Goose, the first folio Bible in America, and a history of printing that he writes himself, about himself, which is exactly as reliable and as indispensable as that sounds.
He does not just collect books. He founds the American Antiquarian Society in 1812, donates his personal library of eight thousand items to it, and builds the institution that will preserve more early American printed matter than any other collection on earth.
His Spark of Liberty was the press itself — moved, hidden, reassembled, and running before the smoke cleared at Concord.
He wrote in his own hand on the first issue printed in Worcester: This is the first thing ever printed in Worcester. The press that printed it still stands at the American Antiquarian Society today.
Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”
Born in Boston on January 19, 1749, he was apprenticed to a printer at age six, according to his own autobiographical accounts, and spent his entire life in the trade. He founded the Massachusetts Spy in 1770 and ran it as the loudest Patriot voice in Massachusetts for five years. On April 16, 1775, three days before Lexington and Concord, he moved his press to Worcester by ox cart. On May 3, 1775, he printed the first American account of the battle. After the war he built Worcester into one of the two great publishing centers of early America, printed the first folio Bible in America in 1791, and published William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy in 1789 — the actual first American novel. He founded the American Antiquarian Society on October 24, 1812, donated his personal collection to it, and served as its president until his death. He died in Worcester on April 4, 1831.
His name was Isaiah Thomas.
Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon
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