Usher was a book-maker, undertaker, and adventurer, doubtfully attractive or desirable appellations nowadays; but what higher praise could have been given in colonial tongue? He would have angrily resented being dubbed a publisher; that name was assigned to and monopolized by the town-crier. Usher died worth £20,000, a tidy sum for those days.
Happy, indeed, were all the Boston book-sellers; blessed of the gods! rich, witty, modish, beloved, beautiful! The colony was sixty years old, opulent, prosperous, and fashionable; but a book-seller cut the best figure. Surely the book trade had in Boston a glorious ushering in, a golden promise which has not yet deserted it.
Book-printing, too, was a highly honored calling. The first machine for the craft and mystery of printing was set up at Cambridge in 1639, and for twenty-three years the president of Harvard College was responsible for its performances. Then official licensers were appointed to control its productions, and not till a decade of years before the Declaration of Independence were legal restraints removed from the colonial press.
The first printer in the colony, Steeven Daye, was about as bad a printer as ever lived, as his work in the Bay Psalm-Book proves; and he spent a term in Cambridge jail, and was altogether rather trying in his relations with the godly ministers who were associated with him in his printery. The second printer had to sleep in a cask after he landed, but he died with a fortune, a true forerunner of the self-made men of America. The third printer, Johnson, having a wife in England, was "brought up" and bound over before the court not to seduce the affections of the daughter of printer No. 2. The next Bostonians who tried their hands at the mechanical part of book-making—the printing and binding—were two of the most prominent citizens; Captain Green, a worthy man, the father of nineteen children by one wife and eleven by another, and rich, too, in spite of the thirty Green olive-branches; and Judge Sewall, also, as Cotton Mather said, "edified and beautified with many children"—fourteen in all. Truly, book-making did prosper a man mightily both at home and abroad in colonial days.
In a book-printer's wife, the mother of the nineteen children, did Dunton find his ideal New England wife; in a book-printer did he find his most agreeable companion.
"To name his trade will convince the world he was a man of good sense and understanding. He was so facetious and obliging and his conversation such that I took a great delight in his company."
So it may be seen that the book-sellers were rivalled by the book-printers—equally rich and witty though not so beautiful. To the credit of both callings, then and for a century to follow, redounds the fact that almost to a man they were deacons in the church. Mayhap their worldly and family prosperity was the reward of their piety. As nine-tenths of the authors were ministers, and the publishers all deacons, the church had at that time what might be called a monopoly of the book trade.
Dunton had a vast interest in the fair sex, owning plainly that he had a "heart of Wax, Soft, and Soon mellowing," though he was careful on every page to make everything seem perfectly straight and proper for the suspicious perusal of his English wife; but any nineteenth-century reader can read between the lines. His famous long-winded eulogies of the Boston virgin, the wife, the widow, "Madam Brick the flower of Boston," and the half widow "Parte per Pale, Madam Toy," whose husband was at sea; and his long rides with one or the other of them a-pillion-back behind him, and his tedious conversations with them on platonics, the blisses of matrimony, and the chief causes of love, show plainly that he had a "wandering eye." He had a deal to say also of his lady customers (who were much the same in olden times as nowadays)—one simple soul who turned over his books rather vacantly till he asked her "in Joque" whether she wanted "Tom Thumb" (a penny chapbook). To his surprise she answered, "Yes;" and he said, still guying, "in Folio and with marginal notes?" and the dull creature replied, "Oh the best." Another hectored him by constantly changing her mind:
"Reach me that book, yet—let it alone; but let me see it however, and yet its no great matter either."
Another sedate Boston dame wished "The School of Venus," to which he reprovingly answered that he had best give her instead "The School of Virtue." Another, to whom he gave a sad setting off (more than hinting at a painted face, though she were a Puritan), wanted plays and romances and "Books of Gallantry." He adds: