children's Bible on March 13, 1789, in Princeton, New Jersey. Now a rare artifact of Americana, Brooks' book is one of four extant copies of A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible. With nearly five hundred woodcuts by American artists, this Bible was the most ambitious woodcut volume produced in America up to that time. A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible is one of sixty-five children's book titles printed by Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831). A preeminent early American printer and pioneer publisher of children's literature, Thomas began his apprenticeship as a young boy. By age seventeen, he was considered an excellent printer in his own right. Over the course of a long career, Thomas published numerous popular titles for children and adults. Also a bookseller, at one point he owned more than twenty bookstores in the Boston area.
One of Thomas' most significant ventures was the Massachusetts Spy, a newspaper he founded with a partner in 1770. By publishing eyewitness accounts of the battles of Lexington and Concord, Thomas fortified popular resistance to British authority in the early stages of the Revolutionary War. Widely read and exceedingly anti-British, his paper so angered Tory authorities that, in 1775, Thomas smuggled his press out of Boston. He fled to Worcester, Massachusetts where he remained for the next fifty-six years.
After the war, Thomas created the Massachusetts Magazine and wrote A History of Printing in America. His most enduring legacy, however, is the American Antiquarian Society, which he established in 1812. Thomas willed his considerable library to the AAS. From its basis in Thomas's 8,000 item collection, the Society's library has grown to include copies of two-thirds of everything printed in the United States up to 1821. It remains one of the most complete collections of early American printing in private hands.
- For evidence of Isaiah Thomas's work as a printer, search A Century of Lawmaking on the term Isaiah Thomas.
- Like The American Antiquarian Society, the Library of Congress holds extensive collections of early American printed matter. The online collection Documents from the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention makes available the Continental Congress Broadside Collection (253 titles) and the Constitutional Convention Broadside Collection(21 titles).
- These two broadside collections are but a small sample of the unique materials of the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room, now totaling over 650,000, include books, broadsides, pamphlets, theater playbills, title pages, prints, posters, photographs, and medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. The nucleus of these collections is still Thomas Jefferson's book collection, sold to Congress in 1815 after the British burned the United States Capitol and its library.
- Examine the first cookbook of American authorship printed in the United States. Several pages of Amelia Simmons American Cookery, first published in 1796, are available for perusal via the Library of Congress online exhibition American Treasures of the Library of Congress.
