TOWARD A FREE PRESS
In spite of Purdie’s efforts, the trend was toward a competitive press. A rival Virginia Gazette was set up in Williamsburg in 1766 by William Rind, a Maryland printer who was more sympathetic to the protesting colonists than Royle and Purdie were thought to be. The motto of his paper cannily proclaimed “Open to all Parties but influenced by None.” Governor Francis Fauquier at this time reported to the British Board of Trade: “The late printer to the Colony [Royle] is dead, and as the press was then thought to be too complaisant to me, some of the hot Burgesses invited a printer [Rind] from Maryland. Upon which the foreman [Purdie] to the late printer, who is also a candidate for the place, has taken up the newspaper again in order to make interest with the Burgesses.” Jefferson, who in 1766 was completing his study of law, and was a friend and admirer of Fauquier’s, recalled later: “We had but one press, and that having the whole business of the government, and no competitor for public favor, nothing disagreeable to the governor could be got into it. We procured Rind to come from Maryland to publish a free paper.”
The hot-spirited Rind was elected public printer by the House of Burgesses. However, the job being too much for one printer alone, the Assembly in 1769 authorized both Gazette publishers, Rind and Purdie, to print a large volume containing the Acts of Assembly then in force. Rind continued in office until his death in 1773 when his widow, Clementina Rind, took over the business as Virginia’s first woman printer.
The number of weekly newspapers in Williamsburg increased again in 1775 when Purdie, who had taken John Dixon into his business nine years before, withdrew in favor of William Hunter, Jr., the son of William Parks’s successor, and established his own Virginia Gazette. When the Revolution broke in 1776, Williamsburg thus had three newspapers, each called the Virginia Gazette. Rind’s Gazette expired by 1777, after a succession of managers, and Purdie’s (which was continued after his death in 1779 by Clarkson and Davis) ceased publication in 1780. Dixon formed a new partnership with Thomas Nicolson in 1779 after William Hunter, Jr., had joined the British forces. Their newspaper was called the Phoenix Gazette and Williamsburg Intelligencer, but it expired the following year when these printers followed the seat of government to establish Richmond’s first press.
So pronounced was the decline in Williamsburg’s fortunes that from the year of the government’s removal until forty-four years later, in 1824, Williamsburg had no newspaper. Old copies of the three Gazettes were treasured reminders of the town’s past glory. The name, Virginia Gazette, and some of the tradition of Parks’s skill were remembered, but little was done to perpetuate them until the late Dr. W. A. R. Goodwin in 1926 invited Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to restore Williamsburg. As a by-product of that movement, the proud masthead of William Parks’s original Virginia Gazette was revived in 1930 by the late Joseph A. Osborne and his family. Likewise, in the realm of paper manufacture, typography, book production, and bookbinding, Colonial Williamsburg has revived the workmanship of William Parks and his confreres. In such publications as The Williamsburg Art of Cookery, or, Accomplish’d Gentlewoman’s Companion, published in 1938, and A Brief & True Report concerning Williamsburg in Virginia, first published in 1935, Colonial Williamsburg emulated type, paper, format, and binding of similar volumes from Parks’s press. And at its Printing Office, it has sought to recapture the manner and mood of a colonial printing shop as a part of its program to teach twentieth-century Americans more about the lives and ideas of their pre-Revolutionary ancestors.
TECHNIQUES OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRINTING
In considering the craft of printing, it is important to remember that the western world has enjoyed the invention of movable type only since the middle of the fifteenth century. For several centuries thereafter, the new development was regarded with suspicion by church and state, which, as we have seen, feared the freedom of thought that would ensue if reading matter were readily available. Even in the eighteenth century, an era of enlightenment, printing was suspect.
An equally difficult obstacle facing the colonial printer was the cost of his press, his type, his paper, and his equipment. Eighteenth-century industry was largely home operated, based on the capital and ingenuity of one family. Yet the cost of equipping even the modest one- or two-press shops of eighteenth-century America was a burden for most people of the working class. In his famous Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin gives a vivid picture of the immense labor and thought that lay between a printer’s apprenticeship and ownership. To reach the level of success that Franklin and Parks achieved required not only skill but unusual industry and shrewdness.
Eighteenth-century appraisals of several printing houses indicate an average value of £100 to £125 currency. We may suppose that William Parks set up shop in Williamsburg in 1730 on some such scale as this, adding type and other equipment to the value of £359 Virginia currency or £288 sterling at the time his equipment was sold to William Hunter in 1751. Undoubtedly Parks’s three presses and his type constituted his chief equipment. The presses presumably were of the English common sort, which had then been in standard use in the British Isles for nearly one hundred years. The type was an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, the letters having been cast in Holland or England, and probably was valued at more than the rest of Parks’s facilities together. For the rest, equipment consisted of such printers’ staples as poles for drying paper, “shooting sticks,” quoins, planes, type cases, type racks, composing sticks, lye troughs, wetting troughs, and other paraphernalia. For bookbinding the printer needed other instruments, some of which could be made in Williamsburg. The majority of the tools, however, were imported from Great Britain or Holland.
