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

Both the Maryland Gazette and the Virginia Gazette evolved in size and
typeface and now contained more news and advertising. The earliest gazettes
consisted of four pages, each about seven and a half inches wide by twelve and a
quarter inches high, with two columns of print. Although the actual page size,
columns, and type size would vary with availability of paper and type, the size and
number of words generally increased with time. By the 1760s, the normal page size
was about fifteen by eleven inches, a considerable space increase of about eighty
percent. In addition, the printer often used a smaller type font and used three and
sometimes four columns, allowing for more stories and advertisements. 50 The
number of pages stayed consistent at four, but the printers published additional
issues, or “supplements” to the weekly paper more often. With a local supply of
paper, that expensive commodity became more readily available, and supplemental
issues would also be printed to include increased news and ads. 51
Newspaper advertisements were an increasingly important part of the
Chesapeake printers’ business and the ads and the newspapers that ran them were
part of an important cultural shift towards consumerism. The ads took an
increasingly larger percentage of the available space in the newspaper, even as the
overall number of words printed increased. Both newspapers sometimes carried
50 Originally, they consisted of two columns per page, but later some versions expanded to
three columns, or even four columns, with a smaller type. Parks originally used a Dutch type font,
but eventually switched to the more readable Caslon font. The most eye-catching aspect of both of
these type fonts, to the modern reader, is the lower case “s” as in “s.” The ascending “s” was used
only in the middle and end of sentences, not at the beginning, and was generally differentiated
from an f by having only a half crossbar or none at all. It remained in use until about 1800. See
Parke Rouse, Jr., The Printer in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: An Account of His Lie & Times, &
of His Craft (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1955; reprint, ed. Thomas K.
Ford, 2001), i, ii, and 5. (Page citations are to the reprint edition).
51 A newly discovered copy of Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg: Joseph Royle. July 6, 1764) in
Special Collections, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, has
three columns. By 1754, Jonas Green’s Maryland Gazette had three columns, by 1767, William
Rind’s Virginia Gazette used smaller type and had four columns on each page. See also see
Lawrence Wroth, The Colonial Printer. 2 nd ed. (Portland, ME: Southworth-Anthoensen Press,
1938; reprint, New York: Dover Publications, 1994), 279-280. On paper, see Ibid., 89-133. Parks
produced the paper locally beginning in 1743.
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