Deborah Franklin
Little Sally Franklin could not have needed eight dozen copies of Aesop’s Fables, nor four Ainsworth’s Dictionaries, so it is probable that Deborah Franklin’s far from ready pen put down the book order for the spring, and that Sally herself was only to be supplied with the “Perceptor,” the “Fables,” and the “one good Quarto Bibel.”
As far as it is now possible to judge, the people of the towns soon learned the value of Newbery’s little nursery tales, and after seventeen hundred and fifty-five, when most of his books were written and published, they rapidly gained a place on the family book-shelves in America.
By seventeen hundred and sixty Hugh Gaine, printer, publisher, patent medicine seller, and employment agent for New York, was importing practically all the Englishman’s juvenile publications then for sale. At the “Bible and Crown,” where Gaine printed the “Weekly Mercury,” could be bought, wholesale and retail, such books as, “Poems for Children Three Feet High,” “Tommy Trapwit,” “Trip’s Book of Pictures,” “The New Year’s Gift,” “The Christmas Box,” etc.
Gaine himself was a prominent printer in New York in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Until the Revolution his shop was a favorite one and well patronized. But when the hostilities began, the condition of his pocket seems to have regulated his sympathies, and he was by turn Whig and Tory according to the possession of New York by so-called Rebels, or King’s Servants. When the British army evacuated New York, Gaine, wishing to keep up his trade, dropped the “Crown” from his sign. Among the enthusiastic patriots this ruse had scant success. In Freneau’s political satire of the bookseller, the first verse gives a strong suggestion of the ridicule to follow:
“And first, he was, in his own representation,
A printer, once of good reputation.
He dwelt in the street called Hanover-Square,
(You’ll know where it is if you ever was there
Next door to the dwelling of Mr. Brownjohn,
Who now to the drug-shop of Pluto is gone)
But what do I say—who e’er came to town,
And knew not Hugh Gaine at the Bible and Crown.”
A contemporary of, and rival bookseller to, Gaine in seventeen hundred and sixty was James Rivington. Mr. Hildeburn has given Rivington a rather unenviable reputation; still, as he occasionally printed (?) a child’s book, Mr. Hildeburn’s remarks are quoted:
“Until the advent of Rivington it was generally possible to tell from an American Bookseller’s advertisement in the current newspapers whether the work offered for sale was printed in America or England. But the books he received in every fresh invoice from London were ‘just published by James Rivington’ and this form was speedily adopted by other booksellers, so that after 1761 the advertisement of books is no longer a guide to the issues of the colonial press.”
Although Rivington did not set up a press until about seventeen hundred and seventy-three,—according to Mr. Hildeburn,—he had a book-shop much earlier. Here he probably reprinted the title-page and then put an elaborate notice in the “Weekly Mercury” for November 17, 1760, as follows:
JAMES RIVINGTON