Isaiah Thomas: Revolutionary Printer

On the night of April 16th, 1775, twenty-six-year-old Isaiah Thomas packed up his Boston printing press and had it rowed across the Charles River under the cover of darkness. With tensions spiking between the British authorities and the American Sons of Liberty, John Hancock had warned Thomas that the Crown might soon impound his press

Thomas was no stranger to intimidation from British authority. In the protests against the 1765 Stamp Act, he participated in a demonstration involving the hanging of an effigy representing a British “stamp-master.” When Thomas refused to give up the names of others involved in the “Liberty Tree” demonstration, the British authorities threatened to jail him. He successfully fought against his arrest in court. 

Beginning in 1770, Thomas published a weekly newspaper called the Massachusetts Spy, devoted to printing political “common sense in common language” for a readership of working-class Americans. The Spy became known for rousing revolutionary sentiment, and Thomas’s printing shop, which often hosted meetings of the Sons of Liberty, was labeled a “sedition foundry” by the British. Thomas later noted (referring to himself in the third person) that “several attempts were made by the government of the province to prosecute the printer, but without effect.” Indeed, in 1771, the British Royal Governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, summoned Thomas to appear before the colony’s Royal Council. When Thomas repeatedly refused this summons, he established the legal precedent that the British could not arbitrarily compel a colonial subject to testify without a written warrant. Although Isaiah Thomas won that battle, it set him and his printing press at war with the British authorities.

In the face of British threats, Thomas secretly removed his press from Boston on April 16th, 1775. Two nights later, on April 18th, Thomas was part of Paul Revere’s network of midnight riders sounding the alarm that the British army was on the move. The next day, April 19th, he joined the militia of minutemen that clashed with British troops in the Battle of Lexington. The day after that battle, April 20th, he set up his printing press in Worcester, Massachusetts and made ready to publish his firsthand account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the May 3rd issue of The Massachusetts Spy. In short, Isaiah Thomas’s printing press amplified the shot heard round the world.

Thomas remained a fixture of American printing and publishing for decades. His printing operation in Worcester began with the single press that was rowed stealthily across the Charles and grew into a sophisticated network of sixteen presses, a paper mill, one-hundred and fifty employees, and a chain of bookstores across the colonies, including branches in Boston, Walpole, Albany, and Baltimore. Benjamin Franklin, a master printer himself, called Isaiah Thomas “the Baskerville of America.”

Thomas’s printing career began when, as a six-year-old, he was apprenticed to Zechariah Fowle. He learned to compose blocks of type before he had even learned to read, setting up the text for a New England Primer that sold 10,000 copies when he was only eight years old. His career continued as a journeyman printer with stops in in Halifax, Nova Scotia, then Portsmouth, New Hampshire, down to Charleston, South Carolina, and eventually back to Boston.

In addition to The Massachusetts Spy, Thomas published an almanac, numerous pamphlets, and, beginning in January of 1774, an intellectual journal called The Royal American Magazine. This monthly publication featured engravings by Paul Revere, poetry by Phyllis Wheatley, and essays on topics such as women’s education, the history of Massachusetts, and moral virtues. Although Thomas claimed that the magazine “had a handsome list of subscribers,” he was only able to publish The Royal American Magazine for six months, and the arrival of the war ended it for good.

Thomas was also prolific in his printing of books, publishing over 250 titles under his imprint. He was innovative in his use of illustrations; indeed, 25% of the books Thomas published included either woodcuts or metal engravings.

Many of these illustrated editions are within the list of 65 children’s books Thomas published. He believed in the importance of providing children with educational “instruction with delight.” For example, his reprinting of A Little Pretty Pocket Book (1787) utilized woodcut illustrations and whimsical verse to make learning fun. 

Published in 1788, A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible is another of Thomas’s most notable children’s books. This book was marketed for children as “an easy way of leading them on in reading.” By substituting words in the text with illustrations, the young reader puzzles out patterns of language and can check their guesses with the full text printed at the bottom of each page. With a total of nearly 500 woodcut illustrations, this amusing volume was among the most heavily illustrated books of its day. Thomas’s innovative design for A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible taught children the stories of the Bible while also developing their reading skills as well as their facility with interpreting images. 

When Thomas retired from his career in printing, publishing, and bookselling, he wrote The History of Printing in America, published in 1810. This seminal work leveraged Thomas’s firsthand knowledge of the people and moments that defined American printing in the nation’s earliest years, and it also relied heavily on Thomas’s exceptional collection of Americana and the research he had conducted into the history of American print culture behind those items. In 1812, Thomas founded the American Society of Antiquaries, known today as the American Antiquarian Society, when he donated his personal library of 8,000 items of Americana (books, newspapers, ephemera, and maps) along with a building in Worcester to house the collection. He served as the AAS’s President until his death in 1831. 

Through his printing of the Revolution’s historical record, his contributions to the emerging and distinct culture of the United States, his wide-ranging collecting practices, and in building a network of bookstores across the United States, Isaiah Thomas created an American legacy of creating, recording, and preserving the history of the new nation. 

 

Sources and Further Reading

American Antiquarian Society. “Isaiah Thomas’s Printing Press.” americanantiquarian.org

Amory, H. and Hall, D. (Eds.) (2000). A History of the Book in America. Cambridge University Press.

Boynton, H. W. (1932). Annals of American Bookselling, 1638-1850. New York.

Lacey, B. (2014). “The Illustrated Imprints of Isaiah Thomas.” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 104, part 2. American Philosophical Society Press. 

Nichols, C. L. (1900). “Some Notes on Isaiah Thomas and his Worcester Imprints.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society. americanantiquarian.org/proceedings.

Thomas, I. (1810). The History of Printing in America. Isaiah Thomas, Jr. Worcester.

York, N. (1995). “Tag-Team Polemics: The ‘Centinel’ and His Allies in the ‘Massachusetts Spy’.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 107. Boston.

 

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