Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 36:141 (Jan 1879)
Article: American Pre-Revolutionary Bibliography
Author: James David Butler

BSac 36:141 (Jan 1879) p. 72

American Pre-Revolutionary Bibliography1

James David Butler

The American Antiquarian Society, dating from 1812, is one of the oldest associations of its class in the United States. It owes its origin and local habitation, as well as books and pecuniary contributions, worth at least fifty thousand dollars, to Isaiah Thomas of Worcester. In 1874 that society did honor to itself while delighting to honor its founder and most munificent benefactor. It erected him a monument by reprinting his principal work, “The History of Printing in America,” first published in 1810, with such corrections and additions as its author contemplated, and would have completed, had his life been prolonged through another generation. This reprint forms the fifth and sixth volumes of the society’s publications, and has cost less than an obelisk or statue that would not last half as long, or be noticed by one tithe as many persons. Besides, nothing but a printed memorial could pre-eminently befit the patriarch of our printing. Gaudet similis simili.

Appended to the text of the history we find a catalogue, which, like the postscript of a lady’s letter, more than doubles the value of what has gone before. It includes every work, large and small, known to have been printed within what is now the United States, previous to the year 1776. This list fills three hundred and fifty-eight pages, and contains about eight thousand titles. Few volumes are more suggestive than this book of title-pages. It is a forcible con-

BSac 36:141 (Jan 1879) p. 73

firmation of the saying that for him who has eyes to see it there is as much physiognomy on the backs of books as in the faces of men. It claims to have realized the ideal of Mr. Thomas, which was to “furnish the only American catalogue of printed books of any consequence, or in any way general, to be met with, or that has been made.” It is a mosaic elaborated from advertisements in ancient newspapers, from publishers’ announcements in old books, from library-catalogues and libraries without number. Owing, in part, to the lack of such bibliographies in his time, Lord Bacon was led to pronounce literary history deficient.

Such statistics, indeed, belong to that reading which is never read, and to some minds recall what a little girl called the “begat” chapters at the beginning of Matthew and Luke. To many they are as dry as Falstaff held an intolerable deal of bread to but one half pennyworth of sack, and as repulsive as the lover declared the mercantile inventory of Lady Olivia’s beauty when labelled item by item, as two lips indifferent red, two gray eyes with lids to them, one nose, one chin, etc.

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