The Woman Who Printed the Word

The shop on Market Street smells of ink and drying paper, presses standing quiet until the next sheet is fed beneath them. Upstairs a bindery holds needle and thread, leather and board. A woman moves between the two floors, setting type with a steady hand, printing under her own name in a trade that almost never lets a woman’s name stand alone.

It is 1808.

She does not just inherit her father’s shop. When he dies in 1802, she takes on his Philadelphia printing house, his bookshop, and his debts, an unmarried woman now responsible for a widowed sister and a disinherited brother.

She does not just keep the presses running quietly. Over the following decade her name appears on nearly sixty printed works, from the transactions of learned societies to a new American novel, proof that she can set and bind the most demanding texts in the trade.

She does not just print for scholars. In 1811 she produces a Philadelphia census directory that, for the first time, lists the city’s Black residents by name, address, and occupation, making them visible in the ordinary paperwork of a growing nation.

She does not just handle familiar texts. In 1808 she prints and binds the first English translation of the Old Testament from its Greek source, the first Bible printed in America by a woman, a beautiful edition that the market never rewards.

Her Spark of Liberty was a trade she was allowed to inherit but never fully allowed to keep.

The Bible sold poorly, the debts deepened, and within a few years her equipment was sold to pay what she owed. She spent her final working years as a binder rather than a printer, her hands still shaping the books of the city’s institutions even after her name stopped appearing on their title pages.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born on July 11, 1764, in Paisley, Scotland, she emigrated to Philadelphia with her family at age seven and learned the print and bindery trade in her father’s shop. When he died in 1802 she inherited the business along with debts that were not entirely his own, and over the next decade printed works for the American Philosophical Society, the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture, and other clients, including the 1808 Thomson Bible and the 1811 Census Directory. By 1813, overwhelmed by debt, she served time in debtors’ prison and lost her printing equipment, after which she supported herself as a bookbinder, working for the American Philosophical Society and the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. She died on August 29, 1832, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, remembered in her obituary simply as a printer and bookseller of the city she had served.

Her name was Jane Aitken.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

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