During my residency at the American Antiquarian Society as a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellow in the fall of 2021, the AAS acquired a letterbook from the New England Type and Stereotype Foundry. The letterbook is now transcribed and available for AAS researchers, offering much for scholars of nineteenth-century print culture, especially those interested in hemispheric print networks.
Based in Boston, MA, the New England Type and Stereotype Foundry sold type and printing presses across the Americas. Their clientele address list shows the hemispheric expanse of their business, spanning the northeastern United States (Concord, NH; Portland ME; Providence, RI; Salem, MA; Woodstock, CT), Canada (Halifax, Nova Scotia), the U.S. South (New Orleans, LA; Charleston, SC; and the newly occupied Florida territory), as well as across Spanish America (Bogotá and Cartagena, Colombia; Guayaquil, Ecuador; Guadalajara and Tampico, Mexico; Havana, Cuba).
The content of the letters in the volume offers readers a glimpse into the finances of printing offices, serving as a stark reminder of just how volatile and financially risky the print industry was in the first decades of the nineteenth century. While this reaffirms common knowledge about the era, the letters evidence this fact in a compellingly granular way.
The letters also evidence optimism about the emancipatory powers of print. A letter written “to the Republic of Colombia” on April 12, 1825, positions the foundry’s epistolary solicitation as not merely a matter of business but one of democratic importance:
“As the commercial connection between your country & ours is daily becoming more intimate we wish to introduce articles which by diffusing knowledge may be the means of giving strength & stability to the free institutions which you have established. If by the introduction of types & printers materials into your rising Republic we should be instrumental in extending the principles of Liberty and humanity among you, the reflection that we were indirectly aiding a cause which Washington & Bolivar have nobly & successfully defended while promoting our own interests would give us much pleasure & thus our patriotic philanthropic & selfish feelings would at the same time be gratified.”
This passage is perhaps the most explicit in advocating the necessity of print to liberal republicanism, but similar sentiments are subtly conveyed across the entire collection of letters. However, the company’s enthusiastic promotion of republicanism was contingent on customers paying their bills. When Mr. Augustus Leland of Bogotá failed to pay his debts three years later in 1828, the foundry wrote to future president William Henry Harrison, asking that he help them retrieve the debt in his capacity as a diplomat to the Republic of Colombia.
The letterbook’s contents span the years 1825 to 1831. Within this short period of time, the foundry changed names three times (John Baker & Co. became Baker and Greele, and finally, when John Baker leaves the company, Greele and Willis) and updated its products to reflect new methods of typecasting and innovations in printing presses. During these years, the foundry added copper to its type, making it more durable than that produced by other foundries (or so it says in the letters).
Due to their interest in a hemispheric, transnational clientele, the firm sold type sets in multiple languages. In addition to Spanish- and English-language sets, it created the first set of Cherokee language metal type used at New Echota to print the Cherokee Phoenix newspaper and other Cherokee language materials, although this is not discussed in the letterbook. Alongside its innovations in type and typecasting, the firm became the sole proprietor of the Union Press (a hand-printing press invented by Isaac Adams and manufactured by Erastus Bartholomew in Connecticut in 1826), at least for a time, and offered its customers fully kitted-out “printing offices” that included everything needed to start a new business.
Our transcription is now available for researchers via a link in the American Antiquarian Society’s General Catalog. I am grateful to Elizabeth Watts Pope, Curator of Books and Digital Collections, and Ashley Cataldo, Curator of Manuscripts, for directing me toward this fascinating archive of the mid-nineteenth-century print industry. The letterbook offers historians a rare glimpse into the day-to-day workings of mid-nineteenth-century hemispheric print networks.
A Note About the Transcription Process: From 2022 to 2024, a group of UC San Diego graduate students — Bianca Negrete Coba, Yomira Varela Guadiana, Vyxz Vasquez — and I transcribed the letterbook. In a way, we were following the spirit of the company by translating manuscript into type. Given the book’s function as a bound archive of business dealings, some of the letters are written in a sloppy hand and the book includes many abbreviations. These factors, combined with the fact that this was the first transcription project any of us had undertaken, led to some unforeseen challenges. For our process, I hired one student transcriber each summer for three years. I transcribed the remaining pages at the end of those three summers and then edited the full transcript for uniformity. We also created a key highlighting the most common abbreviations found throughout the letterbook. We did our best to render the manuscript materials accurately, but we strongly encourage interested researchers to refer to the original for accuracy. Given the extensive use of abbreviations and messy handwriting, some of our transcription choices are invariably subjective.
Kathryn Walkiewicz is a former National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society. Walkiewicz is an Assistant Professor of nineteenth-century American literature and culture in the Department of Literature at the University of California San Diego. Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State, a book based on their fellowship research, was published in 2023.
