A.D. 1438

HENRY GEORGE BOHN


It was perhaps not altogether fortuitous that the invention of printing
came concurrently with the Revival of Learning. Men's minds were turned
toward practical experiment in that art by the very influences made
active through the labors of those scholars who ushered in the
Renaissance. "The art preservative of all other arts" has also preserved
the records of its own beginnings and development, although of its
earlier sources our knowledge is very obscure, and even the modern
achievement, which antiquity in various ways foreshadowed, is itself a
subject of uncertainty and dispute.

Bohn, in his admirable survey of the origin and progress of modern
printing, gives us a full and accurate account, from the earliest
evidences and conjectures relating to antiquity to the latter part of the
nineteenth century, confining himself, however, to European developments.
But before the middle of the sixteenth century printing was introduced
into Spanish America. Existing books show that in Mexico there was a
press as early as 1540; but it is impossible to name positively the first
book printed on this continent. North of Mexico the first press was used,
1639, by an English Non-conformist clergyman named Glover. In 1660 a
printer with press and types was sent from England by the corporation for
propagating the gospel among the Indians of New England in the Indian
language. This press was taken to a printing-house already established at
Cambridge, Mass. It was not until several years later that the use of a
press in Boston was permitted by the colonial government, and until near
the end of the seventeenth century no presses were set up in the colonies