WILLIAMSBURG’S FIRST PRINTER
Although the colony of Virginia was founded in 1607, it was not until the eighteenth century that printing was established there. This delay was largely due to governmental policy. In seventeenth-century England and her colonies, freedom of the press was yet to be established. Even laws passed by governing bodies could not without official permission be printed and circulated for the benefit of citizens. Until the Licensing Act of 1662 expired in 1695, the printing trade in England was confined to London, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and to the English city of York. The governors of the royal colony of Virginia felt empowered to refuse permission for the establishment of printing until the year 1690, after which printers were governed by royal instructions which required a license and permission from the governor as a prerequisite to setting up shop.
Sir William Berkeley, who was governor of Virginia from 1642 to 1652 and again from 1660 to 1677, summarized the attitude of most officials of his day in his famous statement, “But, I thank God, there are no free schools nor printing, and I hope we shall not have these hundred years; for learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them, and libels against the best government. God keep us from both.” (Berkeley was in error: free schools had existed in Virginia, though printing had not.)
In 1682, a few years after Berkeley wrote, a printer named William Nuthead came to Jamestown, then the capital of Virginia, proposing to serve the government by printing the acts of the Assembly. He was ordered by the Governor’s Council to await royal approval. Several months later a new governor arrived with an order from the king that “no person be permitted to use any press for printing upon any occasion whatsoever.” Nuthead moved to Maryland, and printing in Virginia was delayed fifty years.
Title page of TYPOGRAPHIA, printed by William Parks upon the establishment of his press in Williamsburg; reproduced from the only surviving copy—in the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island.
TYPOGRAPHIA.
AN
ODE,
ON
PRINTING.
Inſcrib’d to the Honourable
WILLIAM GOOCH, Eſq;
His Majesty’s Lieutenant-Governor, and Commander in
Chief of the Colony of VIRGINIA.
—— Pleni ſunt omnes Libri, plenæ ſapientum voces, plena Exemplorum vetuſtas; quæ jacerent in Tenebris omnia, niſi Literarum Lumen accederet. Cic. Orat. pro Archia.