Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas (1749-1831), American printer and historian of the press (see Printing). Thomas helped make the press an instrument of public opinion in the United States and set new standards for quality in the graphic arts.

Thomas was born in Boston, Massachusetts. When he was six years old, his mother apprenticed him to Zechariah Fowle, a Boston printer. Thomas began setting type even before he could read. He learned the printing trade from Fowle and Fowle’s partners and became an excellent printer while still in his teens.

At the age of 18 Thomas ran away from Boston and Fowle’s shop to Halifax, Nova Scotia. He worked in a printing shop there and in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, before returning to Boston. After a disagreement with Fowle, Thomas went to Charleston, South Carolina, where he worked in a printing shop and bookstore. In 1770 Thomas returned to Boston, and Fowle made him a partner.

Thomas established a newspaper called the Massachusetts Spy in 1770. The Spy soon outshone the other newspapers in Boston with its design and print quality—and in its radical anti-British editorial slant. The British occupation of Boston in 1775 drove Thomas from the city. He escaped with his press and type and sent his remaining equipment before him to Worcester, Massachusetts. Before arriving in Worcester himself, Thomas joined patriot Paul Revere and others in warning the countryside of a British invasion.

Thomas soon reestablished the Spy in Worcester, where it became the official printing press for the patriots in the colony. On July 24, 1776, he became the first person in Massachusetts to read the Declaration of Independence to a public gathering. The years of the American Revolution (1775-1783) were hard for Thomas, but by the war’s end his business was strong and he began publishing books.

At its height, Thomas’s printing business in Worcester employed 150 people and included seven presses, a paper mill, and a bindery. He quickly established seven branches throughout the colonies. Thomas published the Royal American Magazine from 1774 to 1775, the Worcester Magazine from 1786 to 1788, and the Massachusetts Magazine from 1789 to 1796. In 1775 he published Thomas’s New England Almanack. Thomas secured his reputation as a quality printer through the beauty of his typography and the popularity and importance of his publications. His more than 400 titles included a Bible and other religious volumes, and educational works on grammar and arithmetic. Thomas also published William Perry’s dictionary, the first dictionary printed in America. In addition, Thomas is widely regarded as the greatest early publisher of children’s books, publishing more than a hundred. His first American edition of Mother Goose’s Melody (1786) is the most famous.

In 1802 Thomas passed his printing empire along to his son, devoting the rest of his life to scholarship. Perceiving a need to preserve and study materials on American history, Thomas founded and incorporated the American Antiquarian Society in 1812. He served as the society’s first president and donated to it books, manuscripts, buildings, land, and endowments.