Jonas Green, "P.P.P.P.P." (purveyor, punster, punchmaker General, printer, and poet of Dr. Alexander Hamilton's Tuesday Club of Annapolis), was known throughout the colonies as public printer of Maryland from 1738 until his death in 1767. During that time he printed the Maryland Gazette and published the poetry, essays, and sermons of Maryland's most distinguished men of letters, including the Reverend Thomas Bacon, Henry Callister, the Reverend Thomas Chase, the Reverend Thomas Cradock, the Reverend John Gordon, Dr. Alexander Hamilton, and the Reverend James Sterling. In his own right, Green was one of Maryland's foremost essayists, poets, and humorists.

Like his father before him, Jonas's father, Timothy Green, took up the printing trade in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Shortly after Jonas Green's birth in 1712, Timothy Green moved his family to New London, where he became public printer of Connecticut in 1713. Jonas learned the printing trade from his father. By...