According to his biographer, Mr. Charles Welsh, John Newbery was born in
a quaint parish of England in seventeen hundred and thirteen. Although
his father was only a small farmer, Newbury inherited his bookish tastes
from an ancestor, Ralph or Rafe Newbery, who had been a great publisher
of the sixteenth century. Showing no inclination toward the life of a
farmer, the boy, at sixteen, had already entered the shop of a merchant
in Reading. The name of this merchant is not known, but inference points
to Mr. Carnan, printer, proprietor, and editor of one of the earliest
provincial newspapers. In seventeen hundred and thirty-seven, at the
death of Carnan, John Newbery, then about twenty-four years of age,
found himself one of the proprietor's heirs and an executor of the
estate. Carnan left a widow, to whom, to quote her son, Newbery's "love
of books and acquirements as a printer rendered him very acceptable."
The amiable and well-to-do widow and Newbery were soon married, and
their youngest son, Francis Newbery, eventually succeeded his father in
the business of publishing.

[Illustration: _Title-page from "A Little Pretty Pocket-Book"_]

Shortly after Newbery's marriage his ambition and enterprise resulted in
the establishment of his family in London, where, in seventeen hundred
and forty-four, he opened a warehouse at _The Bible and Crown_, near
Devereux Court, without Temple Bar. Meanwhile he had associated
himself with Benjamin Collins, a printer in Salisbury. Collins both
planned and printed some of Newbery's toy volumes, and his name likewise
was well-known to shop-keepers in the colonies. Newbery soon found that
his business warranted another move nearer to the centre of trade. He
therefore combined two establishments into one at the now celebrated
corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, and at the same time decided to confine
his attention exclusively to book publishing and medicine vending.