Under Pressure: Reading Material Textuality in the Recovery of Early African American Print Work

From 1756 until his death in the early 1790s, Primus Fowle, an enslaved African American, performed typographical and press work involved the in the publication of The New-Hampshire Gazette and other materials printed at the press owned by Daniel Fowle. With the archive of print Primus Fowle created as its object of study, this essay historicizes the exclusion of enslaved people from the study of the history of the book, and theorizes a method of reading non-alphabetic marks in the material texts through which we encounter the presence of figures like Primus Fowle.