A Dictionary of Books Relating to America, from Its Discovery to The

InterBttii of JPmabiirgli ^'^''^ // d^f Pililiotfjeca Americana Vol. XXIX.—WiTHERSPOON TO ZWEY. W-&. "*%= Pti)lioti)eca Americana DICTIONARY OF iioofeg relating; to America, from its discovery to the present time Begun by Joseph Sabin, •I 1 1. Continued by Wilberforce Eames, and Completed by R. W. G. Vail FOR THE Bibliographical Society of America. Volume XXIX. Witherspoon to Zwey. "A painfull work it is I'll assure you, and more than difficult, wherein what toyle hath been taken, as no man thinketh so no man believeth,but he hath made the triall." j4nt. a Wood, Preface to the History of Oxford. ^£tD=|9orfe: 476 FIFTH AVENUE 1936 The Frontispiece Joseph Sabin, from an engraving by S. Hollver, after a photograph. WiLBERFORCE Eames, from a photograph taken in the Lenox Library about 1900. R. W. G. Vail, from a photograph by Benson, Worcester, 1936. The Southworth-Anthoensen Press Portland, Maine TO HARRY MILLER LYDENBERG, DIREC- TOR OF THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, HISTORIAN, BIOGRAPHER, ESSAYIST, BIB- LIOGRAPHER, WHO, BY HIS TACT, DETER- MINATION AND DEVOTION TO THE CAUSE OF AMERICAN SCHOLARSHIP, OVERCAME EVERY OBSTACLE AND, ALMOST SINGLE- HANDED, SECURED THE SUPPORT NECES- SARY FOR THE COMPLETION OF THE LAST THIRD OF THIS DICTIONARY 1186^^3 EDITOR R. W. G. Vail assistant editors Elizabeth G. Greene Marjorie Watkins Geraldine Beard Edna Watkins Phyllis B. Chase PREFACE It was brave in Joseph Sabi'n to offer his Dictionary seventy years ago, a bravery, a daring appreciated best of all by those privileged to follovi^ his steps. He promised a Preface to the whole work with the last volume, and now the writing of that preface falls to me as his successor. There is really little to say. His ideal and his achievement speak for themselves. His followers are happy to have carried his banner. I am grateful for having received from Mr. Vail, and from Miss Greene and Miss Watkins, so much relief from details in these later years. To them go my sincere thanks, and we all join heartily and sincerely in a toast to the memory of Joseph Sabin. W. Eames THE FINAL "STATEMENT" Gibbon closes with a sentence that sticks forever, once seen or heard: "It was among the ruins of the Capitol that I first conceived the idea of a work which has amused and exercised near twenty years of my life, and which, however inadequate to my own wishes, I finally deliver to the curiosity and candor of the public." Would that Joseph Sabin had likewise told us when his dream first took shape, had given us the story of his pilgrim's progress, his tale of where and why he had changed this or that detail or prin- ciple and where he had stubbornly refused to budge a fraction of an inch from the path he had set out to follow. The Prospectus of December 5, 1866, told how the Dictionary had slept and waked with him a full fifteen years, how he had taken four years to lay foundations for the first volume, how he hoped his ideals were now to be realized. When the first volume was finished in 1868, he reprinted the Prospectus as an introduction, promising with the last volume a Preface to the whole. "Had the magnitude and extreme difficulty of the undertaking been presented to my mind in full proportion at the outset," he said, "I should never have attempted it; and, indeed, I may remark, that I have more than once almost determined upon its abandonment; but a deep sense of its importance, however im- perfectly it may be executed, and a strong partiality for bibliographical pursuits, have stimulated me to continue my labor." The child grew and flourished for fifteen years. Then death stayed the hand of the parent. If Sabin had been spared to write his Preface seventy years after he penned the Prospectus, how suggestive would have been his com- parison between the interest today in books relating to America and what he saw in those first years of his apprenticeship in Oxford or what he found some thirty years later when he had attained a unique position and reputation. What would that brusque forthright voice have snapped back to the man asking whether a listing of books was of real help to any one but a book "collector" ! Teachers then did not talk about projects or assignments or themes nor use a dozen other phrases so glibly worshipped and flung about in these latter days. Indeed, when Sabin began there were no departments of American history in American colleges and universities, and the recognition of American history in the academic world had to wait IV THE FINAL STATEMENT. nearly two decades for the founding of the American Historical As- sociation. But thousands of young teachers and students of Ameri- can history and literature and culture who later were to thrill their classes by their method or their spirit have come to profit by the labors of Joseph Sabin. It would have been well worth a winter journey to have heard this bookseller pay tribute to Ebeling and Rich and Ternaux- Compans as earlier travellers on his road; to have listened to his comments on Harrisse; to have heard him talk about Henry Stevens who had transplanted himself from Vermont to London as Sabin had swung from Oxford to Philadelphia and New York; to have got his views about George Brinley and John Carter Brown and James Lenox and their libraries; to have known what he thought about Peter Force and Jared Sparks, Squier and Brevoort, Charles Deane and Henry C. Murphy and Samuel Latham Mitch- ill Barlow; to have watched him compare Samuel G. Drake and William Gowans and Charles B. Norton and Joel Munsell and George Philes and the other rival booksellers of his day. What a picture he could have painted of the people buying, sell- ing, reading, using books of this kind in the middle of the last century! But the very wideness of the field he might have covered for- bids another man's trying to enter it. Here it were best rigidly to hold one's self to facts and to let some future Landor set down the imaginary conversation between Sabin and his printer when the first copy for the title in part one of volume one was turned in, setting over against that the tale of what they said when the printer starts to parcel out the "takes" for the last part of volume twenty-nine. Seventy years mark the interval, but in those seventy years the world has changed much more than in the seventy that went before, or many times that. The "Statement" of 9 August 1928 prefixed to Part 120 that finished volume 20 gives in briefest form the story of the Dic- tionary through the 82 parts that came from the hands of Joseph Sabin between 1867 and 1881, parts 83 to 116 done by Wil- berforce Eames between 1884 and 1892, the dormant years of 1893 ^° 19245 the revival that began with the appearance of Part 117 in 1927. And now we have the final Part 172 in 1 936. THE FINAL STATEMENT. V Tribute was paid in that first "Statement" to the help given by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the American Library As- sociation, the Bibhographical Society of America, the Carnegie Cor- poration; the Pierpont Morgan Library through its Director, Miss Belle da Costa Greene; Mr. J. Percy Sabin, Dr. A. S. W. Rosen- bach, Mr. Lathrop C. Harper, Mr. Carl H. Pforzheimer, Mr. I. N. Phelps Stokes, Mr. William L. Clements, Mr. Herschel V. Jones, Mr. William G. Mather. To these friends renewed thanks are due, and to them must be added the names of Dr. George Watson Cole, the American Coun- cil of Learned Societies whose Permanent Secretary, Dr. Waldo G. Leland, listened with understanding and sympathy when pleas for help were made ; and once more to the Carnegie Corporation which authorized its President, Dr. Frederick P. Keppel, to give further help in 1935 to permit the final spurt to finish in 1936. Dr. Eames has been editor since Mr. Sabin died in 1 88 1. In 1925 Miss Elizabeth G. Greene and in 1927 Miss Marjorie Wat- kins joined as his assistants. In 1930 Mr. R. W. G. Vail became joint editor, and from time to time the staff has included Miss Geraldine Beard, Miss Edna Watkins, Miss Frances Richey, Miss Helen Olney, and Miss Phyllis B. Chase. From 1867 until 1892 the printing was done at the Bradstreet Press in New York City. From 1927 through 1935 (parts 117- 156) the printer was William Edwin Rudge of Mount Vernon and New York. Parts 157 to the end stand to the credit of The Southworth-Anthoensen Press of Portland, Maine. In the early days composition was probably—as it was certainly in the latest periods—done in the printing plant. During the 1884- 1892 years the compositor was A. H. Engelke (Adolf or Adolph), some time a Bradstreet man, later a typesetter in his home in va- rious parts of Jersey City and Englewood. (The type was owned by Mr. Sabin.) All hand setting, of course, in those times, meant many struggles with the countless tribulations that beset the hand man before the arrival of machine composition. The letters between editor and compositor give a vivid picture of what it meant to set such a work so full of uncouth "foreign" words, to plead for more type to be ordered from Philadelphia by Mr. Sabin, to wrestle with the "sorts" caused by simultaneous imposition of Psalms and Ptolemy with their extensive notes in brevier, a proof that composing and press room problems were as varied, as exacting, as exasperating then as they VI THE FINAL STATEMENT.

Load more