America.

By seventeen hundred and sixty Hugh Gaine, printer, publisher, patent
medicine seller, and employment agent for New York, was importing
practically all the Englishman's juvenile publications then for sale. At
the "Bible and Crown," where Gaine printed the "Weekly Mercury," could
be bought, wholesale and retail, such books as, "Poems for Children
Three Feet High," "Tommy Trapwit," "Trip's Book of Pictures," "The New
Year's Gift," "The Christmas Box," etc.

Gaine himself was a prominent printer in New York in the latter half of
the eighteenth century. Until the Revolution his shop was a favorite one
and well patronized. But when the hostilities began, the condition of
his pocket seems to have regulated his sympathies, and he was by turn
Whig and Tory according to the possession of New York by so-called
Rebels, or King's Servants. When the British army evacuated New York,
Gaine, wishing to keep up his trade, dropped the "Crown" from his sign.
Among the enthusiastic patriots this ruse had scant success. In
Freneau's political satire of the bookseller, the first verse gives a
strong suggestion of the ridicule to follow:

"And first, he was, in his own representation,
A printer, once of good reputation.
He dwelt in the street called Hanover-Square,
(You'll know where it is if you ever was there
Next door to the dwelling of Mr. Brownjohn,
Who now to the drug-shop of Pluto is gone)
But what do I say--who e'er came to town,
And knew not Hugh Gaine at the _Bible_ and _Crown_."