The Origins of a Free Press in Prerevolutionary ... - Web Publishing

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Indian medicine. By the mid-eighteenth century, British and colonial printers were
expanding from the standard sixteen pages by adding data such as stage routes,
names of officials, roads and distances, and short moralizing prose. 5
An almanac was one of the earliest commodities to be mass-produced on
the new presses in the American colonies, and the
major northern British-American cities were printing
competing almanacs long before printing took hold in
Virginia. 6 Almanacs were printed as early as 1729 in
Annapolis, Maryland and 1732 in Williamsburg,
Virginia. 7 Prior to existence of a local press, some
residents undoubtedly made use of almanacs printed
in London or Philadelphia. We know that Benjamin
Franklin shipped copies of Poor Richard’s Almanack to
Maryland by 1741, and shipped pocket almanacs to
Williamsburg by 1743. Ten years earlier, Philadelphia
almanacs listed court dates in Maryland and gave
distances of road mileage between cities as far as
Williamsburg. The inclusion of Maryland information indicates that at least they
were being marketed to a reading audience in the Chesapeake colonies. However,
5 Matthew Shaw, “Keeping Time in the Age of Franklin: Almanacs and the Atlantic
World,” (paper presented at the conference, Atlantic World of Print in the Age of Franklin,
Philadelphia, September 29, 2006), 4-8
6 One version of printing history suggests that an almanac was the second thing to come off
the presses in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As this almanac is not extant, some doubt the veracity
of this claim. See Shaw, “Almanacs and the Atlantic World,” 1.
7 Bear, Checklist of Virginia Almanacs, xxix. The oldest extant Virginia Almanack is for 1732,
but no others exist until 1741. The Maryland Almanacks are even less plentiful, with only some
issues from the 1760s still available.