Lydia Bailey: A Checklist of Her Imprints

The Trade

16 D lydia bailey Ruddiman’s The rudiments of the Latin tongue (148 pages, 2,000 copies); Richard Snowden’s The history of North and South America, from its discovery to the death of General Washington (285 pages, 2,750 copies); and Nicolas Wanostrocht’s Recueil choisi de traits historiques et de contes moraux. Troisième édition américaine (288 pages, run unknown). These were all duodecimos, totaling about fifty-five sheets, with an approximate total run of 5,000 copies. At the same time, she printed four almanacs (four sheets each), with runs from 1,500 to 3,000 copies each. She printed twenty-three “packs” of cards, eleven tokens of checks, a ream of waybills, and sixty quires of writs and summonses. All the other single-sheet ephemera that she printed—130 different jobs, including notices, warrants, indentures, circulars , proclamations, permits, bonds, certificates, subpoenas, and bills—totaled more than thirty thousand individual printed items. This rough analysis makes it abundantly clear that Lydia Bailey’s business would not have survived without job printing. The Trade All the printing Lydia did in 1813 was done for twenty-seven patrons. Nine were book publishers (Mathew Carey, Edward Parker, the Kites, Kimber and Richardson, Kimber and Conrad, T. and W. Bradford, Benjamin Busby, Johnson and Warner, and Samuel Jefferis), seven were municipal employees (including her uncle, John Steele, the collector of the Port of Philadelphia), and eleven were local merchants and companies. When she inherited her husband ’s business, she relied heavily on the first group; these, in turn, helped her develop relationships with the second; and the third would eventually become her greatest source of income. Developing successful relationships with local publishers was essential for an urban printing establishment to thrive in the early Republic. Fortunately for Lydia, Philadelphia was a major center of publishing. Leading firms, shipping books far and wide throughout the country, created a steady demand for local printers, of which there were an ever-increasing number.60 Lydia was particularly successful at cultivating extremely profitable relationships with many of Philadelphia’s most prominent publishers early in her career. Most of the publishers of the time are represented in her workbooks—Johnson and Warner, Bradford and Inskeep, the Conrads, Bennet and Walton, the DeSilvers, and Kimber and Sharpless. It certainly gave Lydia a leg up to have Francis Bailey as her father-in-law. Within months of Robert’s death, Francis’s hand is evident in a number of Lydia’s endeavors. The most important of these was the publishing of a new edi- Mistress of Her Situation D 17 tion of the collected poems of Philip Freneau, the “poet of the American Revolution .” Francis, a close political ally of Freneau’s, had been given the manuscript of Freneau’s poems by the author himself many years earlier and had issued an edition of them in 1788. In 1809, unbeknownst to Freneau, barely a year after Robert’s death, the Baileys began work on another edition. Once Freneau learned of this, he decided to attend to the publication in order to make sure that it was free of the errors that had plagued early editions, agreeing to the republication “for the benefit of, and to assist Mrs. Bailey.”61 He oversaw the editing and printing and solicited subscriptions for multiple copies from both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. At the same time Lydia took personal initiative in marketing the volumes. She advertised a “Proposal by Lydia R. Bailey, of Philadelphia, for publishing by subscription, an elegant edition of Freneau’s Poems, written chiefly during the American Revolution” in Kline’s Carlisle Weekly Gazette (and probably many other regional papers) from midFebruary to mid-March 1809 (fig. 4). She printed fifteen hundred copies of the poems and distributed hundreds of them to booksellers both locally and farther afield, some to sell and some on commission, including a large quantity to Philip’s brother, Peter Freneau, in Charleston, South Carolina.62 Carey and Johnson and Warner each subscribed to two hundred copies, the greatest number of any of the subscribers. Lydia embarked on the co-publishing of a New Testament with Johnson and Warner in 1810. This might appear risky, but it was really a case of making good use of an asset she already owned. Around 1788 Francis Bailey had printed the first edition of what is now commonly known as the Bailey Bourgeois New Testament (the imprint reads “Printed by F. Bailey...