Samuel Kneeland of Boston

For last few years I have been fascinated with the history of the book. I first became aware of the significance of this subject when I read Richard Sher's masterful The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (University of Chicago, 2007). Sher awakened me to the importance of eighteenth-century publishers and how lucrative this profession could be. I soon realized the value of Sher's book for my own research as I was finishing up my dissertation on John Erskine. After reading Enlightenment and the Book, I re-wrote my thesis, and dedicated a final chapter to establishing Erskine as the premier evangelical disseminator in the Atlantic world. While Sher's work on the history of the book as it pertains to the Enlightenment is ground-breaking, there are only sparse references to evangelicalism and publishing. I wanted to know more about this elusive topic. To my surprise, hardly anyone has written about the publishers of evangelical works in the eighteenth century. In the case of Erskine, I found that he worked with the Gray publishing firm in Edinburgh to produce most of his works as well as many of the posthumous writings of Jonathan Edwards.

After finishing the dissertation on Erskine, which has since been published as a monograph, I did research on religious printers and publishers in eighteenth-century America. Thanks to tools like the indispensable English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), I came across Samuel Kneeland (1697-1769). Although he was a leading printer and publisher in colonial Boston, to my amazement, no one has ever written a scholarly article or book on him. Last year I conducted research on Kneeland and submitted an article to the journal Printing History. Today, I received my gratis copies of "Samuel Kneeland of Boston: Colonial Bookseller, Printer, and Publisher of Religion," which is in Series Eleven of the January 2012 issue of Printing History. The article should be available very soon on Academic One File.

This is the opening paragraph of the article:

Samuel Kneeland is one of those characters in the history of the book in America who we know played a vital role; yet, very little has been written about him. Related to the prolific Green family of printers, he forged relationships with leading colonial booksellers like Daniel Henchman, printed for the colony of Massachusetts Bay, and published several key religious texts. In the following article, the objective is to shed light on Kneeland's overall contribution to the colonial book trade, identifying those for whom he printed, at what price, and the kinds of literature that he put forward. From an anlysis of Kneeland's life and business, we can gain a further understanding of the history of the book in eighteenth-century America from the perspective of Kneeland, one of the premier bookseller-printers in Boston.

I go on to describe Kneeland's significance as a printer, bookseller, and publisher of religious works. Kneeland formed partnerships with his uncle Bartholomew Green (1667-1732) and later his cousin, Timothy Green (1703-63). The latter firm of S. Kneeland and T. Green established the New-England Weekly Journal in 1727 and claimed the rights to print (1736) and later own (1741) the Boston Gazette. After Kneeland and Green bought the rights to publish the Boston Gazette, they combined it with the New-England Weekly Journal to become the Boston Gazette, or New England Weekly Journal, perhaps the first newspaper merger in colonial America. American religious historians will recall that the Boston Gazette provided news of the revivals associated with the Great Awakening. Articles in the newspaper, for instance, alerted readers to the travelings of George Whitefield, including upcoming his speaking engagements in America. After Green left the firm to go to his hometown of New London, Kneeland sold the Boston Gazette to Benjamin Edes and John Gill, who altered the title of the paper slightly and began a new issue in April 1755.

Besides printing newspapers, Kneeland also printed and published several key religious works. He printed best-sellers like Philip Doddridge's The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, Solomon Stoddard's The Safety of Appearing at the Day of Judgment, Thomas Prince's A Chronological History of New-England, George Whitefield's Sermons on Various Important Subjects, and John Flavel's Token for Mourners. Perhaps most importantly, he printed many of the writings of Jonathan Edwards, including The Life of David Brainerd and Freedom of the Will.

Kneeland also was a publisher, which meant that he underwrote the costs of publications himself. Publishing was a risky venture, but it had a greater potential for profits than a set fee charged by printers. In the article, I provide an appendix that lists the known works published by Kneeland. In his early years, Kneeland published familiar authors like Cotton Mather, Thomas Foxcroft, Samuel Checkley, Richard Baxter, and Matthew Henry. As the revival fires of the Great Awakening heated up, he published George Whitefield, Jonathan Dickinson, and Thomas Prince. Most notably, Kneeland underwrote Jonathan Edwards's seminal Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746). By the time that Kneeland retired, he could claim over nine hundred imprints bearing his name as printer or publisher.

If you are interested in reading more about Kneeland, please contact William T. La Moy, the editor of Printing History, for a hardcopy of the article. Alternatively, when the article appears on Academic One File, you could download a copy of it.

Jonathan Yeager

Growing Collection of Antiquarian Books

My library of antiquarian books has been increasing exponentially in the past few years. I have been collecting a lot of books by Jonathan Edwards in order to study them for my writing project entitled, Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture.  I am particularly excited about a first edition of The Life of David Brainerd (1749) that will soon arrive in the mail from an antiquarian dealer. I have found an enormous amount of information on the publication of this particular edition, and can't wait to talk about some of the more interesting aspects of its printing in my upcoming talk at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School at 1:30pm on October 13.

The picture above is an image of some of the books by Edwards that I have purchased, assembled randomly on a nearby bookshelf--from left to right: A History of the Work of Redemption (Boston: Edward Draper and John Folsom, 1782), A History of the Work of Redemption (Edinburgh: William Gray, 1774), A History of the Work of Redemption (Worcester, MA: Isaiah Thomas, 1792), Practical Sermons (Edinburgh: Margaret Gray, 1788), Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Boston: Samuel Kneeland and Timothy Green, 1746), Miscellaneous Observations on Important Subjects (Edinburgh: Margaret Gray, 1793), Remarks on Important Theological Controversies (Edinburgh: James Galbraith and Archibald Constable, 1796), The Life of Jonathan Edwards (Northampton: S. and E. Butler, 1804), A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God... To Which is Added, True Grace, Distinguished from the Experience of Devils  (Elizabethtown: Shepard Kollock, 1791), Twenty Sermons on Various Subjects (Edinburgh: Margaret Gray, 1789), Freedom of the Will (Wilmington: James Adams, 1790), The Life of David Brainerd (Edinburgh: William Gray, 1765), Joseph Bellamy's True Religion Delineated (Boston: Samuel Kneeland, 1750), Original Sin (Boston: Samuel Kneeland, 1758), A History of the Work of Redemption (New York: Printed by Thomas and James Swords for the Editor [Cornelius Davis], 1793), and Samuel Hopkins's two-volume System of Doctrines (Boston: Isaiah Thomas and Ebenezer Andrews, 1793).

One of the points that I will be making in Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture is that the way that Edwards's books were published mattered. Using the publication of Edwards's works as a focal point, I will argue that the format, bindings, quality of paper used, and cost per copy of eighteenth-century books can tell us a lot about early evangelical publishing. For instance, one can see from the image above that there is a notable size difference between the Draper and Folsom edition of A History of the Work of Redemption in 1782 (on the far left) and the first edition of A History of the Work of Redemption, published at Edinburgh by William Gray in 1774 (second from the left). The 1774 first edition of this book was published in an octavo format (8⁰) of close to 400 pages. The Draper and Folsom edition in 1782, although also published as an octavo, is only about 300 pages in length. A quick study of the typography of the two editions will show that the Draper and Folsom edition was printed more compactly than the first edition by William Gray, with smaller type and less generous line spacing. Many Reprints, like the Draper and Folsom edition of A History of the Work of Redemption, were printed more compactly in order to cut costs and often to market it at a cheaper price. But some reprints were composed page-for-page and line-for-line with the first edition, which is why it is important to look at key bibliographical information, such as collation formulas, on the English Short Title Catalogue or other sources, to determine if you are dealing with a true reprint or a reissue of the same book with a false title page (claiming, for instance, that it is a new edition). The pagination, collation formula, and typography reveal that the Draper and Folsom reprint is a true edition (and not a reissue) in which the type had been reset. The fact that it was reprinted as a more condensed book, that this is the second time that A History of the Work of Redemption was published, and that it was produced at America in 1782 is important information. Knowing these details, and the difficulty that Americans had importing books from Britain during the War of Independence, provide clues for why Draper and Folsom reprinted this book. Further evidence from manuscript letters and bookseller's advertisements in the period suggest that there seems to have been a demand for A History of the Work of Redemption in America that could not be met by the Edinburgh first edition published in 1774. Although William Gray's daughter Margaret reported to the Scottish minister John Erskine that there were some 200 unsold copies of the Edinburgh edition as late as 1786, the interruption of communication and trade that took place in the War of Independence barred these copies from being shipped to America for sale. Noticing that there was no second edition, Draper and Folsom probably sought to capitalize on the combination of a strong demand in New England, that there would not be any competition coming from British imports, and that they could market a cheaper version of the book. While this is admittedly a speculative analysis, especially since I have yet to locate an advertised price for the Draper and Folsom reprint to compare it with the Edinburgh edition to substantiate my claim about the former being a cheaper version, it represents a plausible interpretation that can be made from studying the history of publications.

Another interesting difference between the Folsom and Draper reprint and the first edition published by William Gray is the way that the two books were bound. The Draper and Folsom reprint, in the image on the left below, is clearly smaller in size. My particular copy was bound on calfskin, with raised bands, gilt lines, and lettering on the spine. The larger copy of William Gray's edition of A History of the Work of Redemption to the right was bound on sheepskin, which was a poorer quality material than calfskin, but it displays a more advanced "tree" style marbling that would have been stained by the finisher with pearl ash and copperas. Since this first edition was published in 1774, it fits very well within the period when this style of binding was popular in Britain, from 1770 until the end of the eighteenth century.

Two editions of A History of the Work of Redemption--Draper and Folsom (Boston, 1782) and W. Gray (Edinburgh, 1774)

I bought Isaiah Thomas's 1792 Worcester edition of A History of the Work of Redemption (the third book from the left in the image at the top of this post) because there is an an interesting story behind the scenes that took place when this book was published. After Jonathan Edwards died in 1758, his son Jonathan Edwards, Jr. eventually began working with the Edinburgh minister John Erskine to publish some of his father's manuscript writings. The first book published in this collaboration was the 1774 Edinburgh edition of A History of the Work of Redemption, originally a sermon series delivered by Edwards in 1739. Edwards, Jr. transcribed his father's manuscript, and sent it to Scotland for Erskine to edit into a continuous book. While editing it in Edinburgh, Erskine secured the services of a local bookseller named William Gray to publish it in 1774. Although two other editions of A History of the Work of Redemption had come out between the time of the 1774 first edition and Thomas's 1792 edition (including the Draper and Folsom 1782 reprint), Edwards, Jr. threatened to sue Thomas for illegally printing his father's work without offering him any copyright money or royalties. I have designated a place in my introduction to talk about this episode, but the short story is that Thomas curtly replied to Edwards, Jr. that the American Copyright Act of 1790 did not apply to him since the original British copyright for this book lapsed in 1788, and that American booksellers and printers could not be prosecuted for publishing foreign books.

The fifth image from the left is of Edwards's Treatise Concerning Religious Affections, first published in 1746. I talk quite a bit about this edition in my book because some 1,300 subscriptions had been taken for it, and it was printed on especially white paper, which I suggest came from a captured Spanish vessel during the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48) that was brought to port in Philadelphia. The brief synopsis of why I think that the paper in this book came from this captured ship is that Benjamin Franklin reported receiving a large stock of paper from this ship, selling off large portions of his supply to members of the colonial Boston book trade. I have found that during the years 1743 to 1746, several Boston printers (including Samuel Kneeland) issued pamphlets and books on very nice white, watermarked paper that can be traced to the Iberian Peninsula. In the image below, you can see Samuel Kneeland's typical "Cambridge panel" style of binding on the boards, with blind tooling and corner floral designs. Many of the books that Kneeland printed showcase this style of blind tooling that had been popular in England, from the late seventeenth century to about the 1740s.

Skipping to the far right image of books on my shelf is the two-volume set of Samuel Hopkins's System of Doctrines, published by Isaiah Thomas and his partner Ebenezer Andrews in 1793. Once I finish my monograph on how Edwards's works were published in the 18th century, I plan on writing an article on the publication of Hopkins's monumental systematic theology of the New Divinity movement. There is a ton that I could say about this book, including the huge subscription list and section of "Free Blacks" who subscribed, the cost of its publication, and some of the strategies that Thomas and Andrews employed to save costs during its printing. I am also intrigued by Hopkins's statement in his Sketches of the Life of the Late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, edited by Stephen West in 1805, that he received $900 in copyright money from Thomas and Andrews.

Rather than talk about these details, I simply want to highlight a key feature in my two-volume set. One of the most interesting aspects of my copy of Hopkins's System of Doctrines is a bookplate pasted to the recto of the title page to the second volume, opposite the table of contents. The bookplate indicates that this particular two-volume set belonged at one time to John Folsom's circulating library in Boston at No. 30 Union Street. This is the same Folsom who reprinted A History of the Work of Redemption in 1782. The bookplate further gives the conditions for becoming a member of the circulating library, stating that patrons would pay two dollars per quarter, which would allow them to borrow two books at a time for no longer than one month. Non-members could also borrow books and pamphlets, but at a higher cost, and only for one week. Finally, there is a notable statement about the conditions of borrowing books, letting patrons know that "Any Book lost, abused, leaves folded down, written upon, or torn, must be paid for; and if it belong to a set, the whole must be taken and paid for, or reasonable compensation made, and for the loan of it, up to the time of payment." If you look at the image of the spine on my set in the image above, you will notice the gilded number 52 at the bottom of the first volume. My first guess was that this number indicates that it was the fifty-second book in Folsom's circulating library, and shelved chronologically next to the other books that belonged there. However, in John W. Folsom's Catalogue of Books for Sale and Circulation... (Boston, [1794?]), Hopkins's System of Doctrines is listed as number 119 (out of 1086). So, I need to do some more research on the binding and lettering of my copy of the volumes.

Stay tuned for more posts on Jonathan Edwards and Transatlantic Print Culture.

A Piece of History

I was excited to receive by post today, my first edition copy of Jonathan Edwards's Religious Affections, published at Boston in 1746. I can see that this particular copy was originally bound in calfskin, but at some point, the front and back covers were overlaid with a cheaper form of sheepskin. It is cool to think that the copy that I now own was most likely bound in Samuel Kneeland's shop, and might have been purchased by one of Edwards's friends in his New England network.

Religious Affections is one of Edwards's most important books, and, significantly, published first in America (as opposed to London). By 1746, Edwards had already established an international reputation by authoring such works as A Divine and Supernatural Light (printed by Kneeland and Green at Boston in 1734), A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God (first published by John Oswald at London in 1737), a volume of sermons printed by Kneeland and Green at Boston in 1738, Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God (Boston: Kneeland and Green, 1741), The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (Boston: Kneeland and Green, 1742), and Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival of Religion in New England (Boston: Kneeland and Green, 1742). Although Kneeland was involved in producing a number of Edwards's writings, Religious Affections is the only time that I know of when the Boston printer acted as a publisher for Edwards.


There is a really interesting advertisement at the end of the volume by Kneeland in which he discloses the approximate number of subscribers and his fear that he did not produce enough copies of Religious Affections to meet the public demand. In my current book project, I explain why Kneeland's advertisement at the end of Religious Affections actually hurt the sale of this edition. You'll have to read my book when it is completed to get the full explanation of this part of the story.

Kneeland published a separate proposal for Religious Affections in a broadside that he printed at Boston in the spring of 1745. Although he doesn't provide the price in this printed proposal, I found a manuscript from one subscriber who said that he paid 28 shillings Old Tenor for his copy of Religious Affections. Even though this person probably purchased his copy at a discounted price, we can use his cost as a basis and multiple this amount by the approximate number of subscribers stated in Kneeland's advertisement to arrive at a gross sales figure of £1,820, or roughly £230 Lawful Money. This amount would not have made Kneeland rich, but he certainly could have made a tidy profit on this venture had he been able to unload his inventory.

The Life of David Brainerd

Title page for The Life of Brainerd, signed on the flyleaf by Moses Peck

Today, I am reporting on the newest edition to my collection of antiquarian books, The Life of David Brainerd. This was Jonathan Edwards's most popular book, and has never gone out of print. It is a biography about a young New England missionary to Native Americans who died of tuberculosis at Edwards's house in Northampton, Massachusetts. Edwards's biography of Brainerd was first published at Boston in 1749 by the bookseller Daniel Henchman (1689-1761), who hired Samuel Kneeland (1697-1769) to do the composition and print work. The patriot printer Isaiah Thomas described Henchman as "the most eminent and enterprising bookseller that appeared in Boston, or, indeed, in all British America, before the year 1775." Henchman's daughter Lydia married Thomas Hancock, another bookseller and merchant in Boston, and the uncle of John Hancock.

Subscription list for The Life of Brainerd, showing Moses Peck's name

Henchman hired Kneeland as his printer on several occasions, but The Life of Brainerd represents their largest collaboration. The book was printed as an octavo of nearly 350 pages, and contains a subscription list of nearly 2,000 people after Edwards's preface. One of the subscribers on the list was Moses Peck (1717-1801), a silversmith and watchmaker who attended the Old South Church along with Henchman and Kneeland, pastored by the evangelical minister Joseph Sewall and Thomas Prince. Peck was friends with the revivalist Eleazar Wheelock (founder of Dartmouth College) and the Mohegan evangelical minister Samson Occom, and was very supportive of missionary work among Native Americans. My particular copy was signed by Peck at three different times on the flyleaf sheets, including the leaf opposite the title page, as shown in the first image above.

An extant proposal for The Life of Brainerd describes the condition of the sale to subscribers, offering a number of binding options. It could be bought "halfbound, with pasteboard and cover'd with blue or marble paper," for twenty-four shillings in Old Tenor Massachusetts currency, "common plain bound" in sheepskin for twenty-eight shillings, or plain bound in sheepskin and "sowed on bands" for thirty-two shillings. According to the proposal, half the impressions for this book would be printed on one kind of paper, and a second would be printed on a paper of an inferior grade that would reduce the costs listed above by two shillings.

In the colonial period, books could be bound in a variety of ways. One of the cheapest options was to use pasteboard, made by layering several poor quality sheets of paper together by pressure until a certain thickness had been achieved. Pasteboard was often covered with inexpensive blue or marbled paper to add some color to the boards. Mention in the proposal that the books with pasteboard and marbled paper would be "halfbound" meant that the spine and part of the boards would be overlaid with leather. The other options to subscribers were for full leather bindings in sheepskin. As the cheapest form of leather available in the colonies, sheepskin provided a sturdier and better option than books "in boards" alone, although still inferior to those bound with a more durable product like calfskin or goatskin.

Even though the proposal only presented the book to subscribers in these three options, I have located several records indicating that about seventy copies or so were bound in calfskin, and some with elaborate gilt work. The most prominent name featured on the subscription list, Governor Jonathan Belcher, for instance, ordered three copies at forty shillings and another three at 37s.6d. These expensive copies were assuredly bound with gilt work and at least three seems to have had a black label on the spine (one of the purchasing orders contains the description "black" next to the entry).

Moses Peck's book was clearly bound in sheepskin and with raised bands (see images above). This means that Peck paid either thirty-two or thirty shillings for his copy, depending on the kind of paper that the printer used for this particular copy (In the days ahead, I will be analyzing the paper used within the book). The tooling work on the boards of Peck's book is also very interesting to me. It mirrors other copies of The Life of Brainerd that I have seen at archives, such as the Library Company of Philadelphia. Based on my research, I think that either Henchman or someone in his shop did the binding work, and not Kneeland, who was hired solely to do the printing.

In my forthcoming book, I will be talking a lot about the publication of The Life of Brainerd. With nearly 2,000 subscribers, it surpassed the average print run for colonial books by at least 1,500 copies. An army of ministers and magistrates gathered subscriptions for the book, including Brainerd's Yale classmate Samuel Buell (debited for 141 copies) and friend Ebenezer Pemberton (71 copies).

In order to complete the composition and print work, Samuel Kneeland ordered at least ninety-four reams of paper. At twenty-two sheets in octavo per book, this number of reams would have been enough to complete the print work for roughly 2,000 copies. With the help of Professor Michael Winship at the University of Texas at Austin, my preliminary analysis is that at first Kneeland thought that he could print the book with eighty-eight reams of paper, forty-four reams for each of the two kinds of paper mentioned in the proposal. However, at some point, it appears that he notified Henchman that he would need at least an additional six reams to complete the job. The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) contains a note signifying that a number of sheets were reprinted and inserted into the middle of the book. These sheets presumably came from the extra reams of paper that Kneeland ordered from Henchman. I will be studying the collation formula in my copy in order to figure out how many of the pages were reprinted and inserted into the book, and on what kind of paper. A quick look at some of the pages at the beginning of the book and in the middle of my copy, shows that this was a different kind of paper by comparison to most of the other pages. In the image below, if you look closely, you may be able to see small sections of light colored paper at the beginning and middle of the book.

In my forthcoming book, I will be including much more detailed information on the publication of The Life of Brainerd and other books by Jonathan Edwards.

My First Digital Humanities Project

At the annual American Society of Church History meeting at Washington D.C. in January 2014, I presented a paper entitled, "The Role of Samuel Kneeland and Daniel Henchman as Jonathan Edwards's Chief Printer and Publisher in Boston." The chair of the panel that I was on, Catherine Brekus, challenged me to do some extensive work on Jonathan Edwards's subscription lists. I remember my initial feeling of being overwhelmed at the thought of analyzing Edwards's extant subscription lists, each of which contains hundreds of names. I decided to bite the bullet, however, and dive into a detailed analysis of some of Edwards's subscription lists.

One of my intended projects involved creating digitized subscription maps that would show concentrations of subscribers. Early last summer, I approached UTC's GIS manager Andy Carroll with a proposed project to create digital maps of subscription lists that were included in four of Jonathan Edwards's books, Freedom of the Will (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754), The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1758), A History of the Work of Redemption (New York: Robert Hodge, 1786), and A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Elizabethtown: Robert Hodge, 1787). We have now completed these maps and are happy to make them available to the public.

This was the process:

Step #1: Plot the subscriptions on Google Maps

This part of the process took a long time. I spent weeks plotting the names of individual American subscribers on Google Maps, and when I wasn't sure where a particular person resided, I used Google Books and other means to try and locate precisely where that individual was living at the time of the publication.

Subscription list for Religious Affections (1787)

This brings me to an important caveat for these maps: I was not able to plot every single subscriber, and I only plotted the names of people living in America (not Britain). Because some names on these subscription lists did not offer their place of residence, and there were a few common names (such as John Smith) that would be impossible to find information about, I did not plot them. The good news, however, is that I was able to plot over 90% of the subscribers using all the available resources that I had at my disposal. Overall, the maps provide an accurate picture of the concentrations of subscribers for each of the four subscription lists. One final note. Andy Carroll and I are still making a few adjustments to some of the plotted points on the websites that we have created. For the most accurate picture, please continue to check our maps for updates.

Step #2: Turn the Google Maps that I created over to Andy Carroll at UTC

At first Andy tried to use a "honeycomb" grid system to convert my Google Maps to digital forms, but we decided to abandon this initial software program. The major problem here is that the software program that he tried using pulled subscribers to the center of the nearest honeycomb, many times skewing the representative numbers for a particular area. One example is Boston. Because Boston was not located in the middle of a grid point, but rather was the site of a convergence of three honeycomb grid borders, the subscribers in the town were pushed out of the center of the town to locations on the outskirts. Another problem emerged when subscription points on coastal towns were pulled to a grid out on the water, making it appear as though subscribers could be found on parts of the Atlantic Ocean!




Ultimately, Andy settled on heat maps to convert the plotted points on my Google Maps. Below are the links for each of the subscription lists. Simply click on one of the titles, and it will take you to a heat map that we created.

• Freedom of the Will (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1754)--Note: The British subscribers were not plotted
• The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (Boston: S. Kneeland, 1758)
• A History of the Work of Redemption (New York: Robert Hodge, 1786)
• A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (Elizabethtown: Robert Hodge, 1787)