Nathaniel Hurd, whose grandfather, emigrating from England, settled in Charlestown, Massachusetts, was probably the first American who engraved copper-plates. His best designs had humour and character. One of his well-known plates represents Hudson, the forger, in the pillory. He engraved a seal for Harvard University. Hurd was born in 1730, and only lived to 1777.
Hewins gives Hurd’s plate of Thomas Dering, 1749, as the first American plate by an American engraver which is both signed and dated.
Much interest among bookplate collectors has, of course, centred round the plate of George Washington, both on account of its being George Washington’s, and being rare. It is a good armorial Chippendale plate. Learned inquirers have failed to establish who engraved it, and on which side of the broad Atlantic!
The plate of the next worthy to be named is a fine armorial ex libris with the motto: “nec elatus nec dejectus.” The owner of this plate was Isaiah Thomas, born in Boston in 1749, and dying at Worcester, also in Massachusetts, in 1831; he was, at six years old, apprenticed to Zachariah Fowler, ballad printer. In 1770 Thomas became partner with his former master. Together they issued the Massachusetts Spy, “open to all parties, but influenced by none.” Thomas was soon left alone in his undertakings. A few days before the battle of Lexington, in which he bore his part, he packed up his press and types, and took them by night to Worcester. There he resumed the issue of the Spy, which, at all events in 1888, was still being regularly issued. In 1786 he got from Europe the first fount of music ever used in New England. In 1788 he opened a book store in Boston. In 1791 he issued the Bible in folio. He gave his own fine collection of books, amounting to 8,000 volumes, to the Worcester Antiquarian Library.
Of him William Lincoln wrote; “His reputation will rest on manly independence, which gave through the initiatory stage and progress of the Revolution, the strong influence of the press he directed, towards the cause of freedom, when royal flattery would have seduced, and the power of government subdued, its action.”
The wreath and armorial bookplate of John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States, is almost more pleasing to behold than one could expect to have been chosen by one of the very sternest old Puritans that ever breathed; but, after all, John Quincy Adams was a scholar and man of affairs, who from early boyhood had travelled much, and in good company. All this would give him some ideas of good taste. “J. Q. A.” seems to lead involuntarily to the thought of another wreath and armorial bookplate of a not less interesting character.
The lawyer, Josiah Quincy, was born in 1744, in Boston, and died at sea in 1775; but much happened in that short spell of years. He was one of the first to say in plain terms, “that an appeal to arms, followed by a separation from the mother-country, was inevitable.” Early in 1773, when already suffering from consumption, he took a voyage under doctor’s orders; but, returning to Boston, he was present in the Old South Meeting-house on December 16th, and as the men, disguised as Indians, rushed past the door on their way to the tea-ships, he exclaimed: “See the clouds which now rise thick and fast upon our horizon, the thunders roll and the lightnings play, and to that God who rides on the whirlwind and directs the storm, I commit my country.”
The plate, with armorial shield and crest, of Dr. John Jeffries may be remembered, though no draughtsman or engraver’s name is tied to it, as the bookplate of the man who, in Boston, in 1789, delivered the first lecture on anatomy ever given in New England.
We may turn now from surgeons to a doctor of divinity. The plate of Samuel Farmar Jarvis, D.D., here reproduced from my copy of Bingley’s Voyagers—in which Jarvis has written: “To my dear Edrica Faulkner a small token of regard from her affectionate