What was advertised in a revolutionary American newspaper 250 years ago today?
“ISAIAH THOMAS … has removed his PRINTING OFFICE to SALEM.”
Isaiah Thomas had plans to establish a new newspaper in Salem in the fall of 1776. He announced his intention in an advertisement in the September 5 edition of the New-England Chronicle, declaring that “at the Request of several Gentlemen in the County of Essex, he has removed his PRINTING OFFICE to SALEM” and would begin publishing a newspaper there “as soon as a sufficient Number of Subscribers appear to support it.” Thomas described himself as the “Late Printer and Publisher of the well-known Massachusetts Spy, in BOSTON,” but he did not mention that he had also left Boston just before the battles at Lexington and Concord and printed the Massachusetts Spy in Worcester throughout the siege of Boston. Not long after the British evacuated Boston in March 1776, Thomas made plans to return to the coast and leased the Massachusetts Spy to William Stearns and Daniel Bigelow. He had more experience printing a newspaper that supported the American cause than he acknowledged in his advertisement.
To make his new newspaper competitive with others printed in and near Boston, Thomas pledged that customers could purchase subscriptions “on the same Terms as the Boston Papers.” M. Williams, a bookseller, already collected subscriptions. The printer anticipated that he would soon take in subscriptions at his printing office in the store previously occupied by John Gooll “in the Main-Street, fronting the Road leading to Marblehead.” He estimated that it would take about four weeks to gather enough subscribers to support the newspaper. Despite his efforts and experience, however, the new newspaper never materialized. Thomas recounted what happened only briefly in his History of Printing in America(1810), stating that “many obstructions to the plan arising in consequence of the war” caused him to sell “the printing materials which he carried to that town.” In 1778, he returned to Worcester, “took into possession the press which he had left there, and resumed the publication” of the Massachusetts Spy.[1] People clamored for the news, as a notice from Stearns and Bigelow in the Massachusetts Spy demonstrated, yet that was not necessarily enough to make printing a newspaper a viable enterprise. Whether or not Thomas attracted enough subscribers, a variety of challenges, including shortages of paper during the Revolutionary War, prevented him from launching a newspaper in Salem.
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[1] Isaiah Thomas, The History of Printing in America: With a Biography of Printers and an Account of Newspapers (1810; New York: Weathervane Books, 1970), 181.
