Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/121

CHAPTER XXIX Book Publishers and Publishing THE history of book publishing in British North America be- gins with 1 640, when Stephen Daye printed at Cambridge The Bay Psalm Book, the first real book to issue from a press north of Mexico. Daye continued to print for only about seven or eight years, when he was succeeded by Samuel Green, for causes known only to the authorities of Harvard College, under whose direction this first American press was operated. Back of Harvard stood the more or less arbitrary authority of the Crown, exercised against publication in more than one colony through some ultra-conservative governor or council. In fact not until about twenty-one years before the Revolution were legal restrictions removed from publishing in the colony where it was bom. These restrictions, in the case of Massachusetts, were largely motivated by religion ; and the early issues of the press were almost entirely religious in character. The first monu- ment of American scholarship and printing abihty, for instance, is The Holy Bible . . . Translated into the Indian Language, Cambridge, 1663. Six years later from the same press ap- peared what seems to be our first original book not strictly religious in character, Nathaniel Morton's New England's Memorial. Moreover this work announces that it is "Printed for H. Usher of Boston." Urian Oakes's Elegie Upon the Death of the Reverend Mr. Thomas Shepard, ' in some respects the best poem produced in the colonies before the eighteenth century, dates from 1677. As early as 1693, at least, book dealers had begun to sell private libraries, for in that year appeared The Library of the Late Reverend and Learned Mr. Samuel Lee . . . ' See Book I, Chap. ix. 533