Colonial Readers.

The first European settlers in North America depended on the Old World for reading matter, bringing with them or importing books from their mother countries. Even in New England, where a printing press was established at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1639, most books of any length came from England. Printers set up shop in Boston in 1675, Philadelphia in 1683, and New York in 1693. (A Dutch printer had been active in New Amsterdam during the 1650s.) By 1750 there were also printing presses in New London, Connecticut; Newport, Rhode Island; Annapolis, Maryland; Williamsburg, Virginia; Charleston, South Carolina; and at Germantown and Ephrata in Pennsylvania. Yet printing a long work required more type and equipment than most of them could muster, and until after the Revolution most books sold in America were imported. With some notable exceptions most colonial printers concentrated on government documents, almanacs, sermons, and other pamphlet-length...