A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

fact that Sharpe did not transmit copies to England until July 31, 1766,
and from the further evidence that it was not until August 21, 1766, that
it was offered for sale in the Maryland Gazette by Mr. Lancelot Jacques of
Annapolis, one concludes that the printing of the index and preface, and
the binding of the book, referred to by Sharpe a year before, had held up
its publication much longer than had been anticipated. Into its making had
gone thirteen years of toil on the part of Bacon and four years of honest
labor on the part of Green, not to speak of much concern and activity ex-
ercised by Sharpe and others prominent in the Provincial government. Green
died about a year after its publication, while Bacon lived long enough to
see his laborious compilation become a work of unquestioned public use-
fulness. In scholarly and systematic arrangement as well as in accuracy and
completeness it excelled any of the former bodies of law which the Province
had possessed. Since the Revolution and its constitutional changes, Bacon's
compilation has been of little practical value in the courts, but until the
publication of the Archives of Maryland was begun in the closing years of
the nineteenth century, it remained to the historian and the antiquarian
the most useful single source on the past of the Province of Maryland. As
an easy and dependable guide to the store-house of Maryland history it re-
mains still without a rival. To possess a collection of works on Maryland
history from which a copy of Bacon has been omitted is to have a house
built upon sand, while a collection of colonial laws or of works illustrative
of American printing which does not include that work, by this omission
confesses itself incomplete.

Green issued Bacon's great book in two distinct editions; that is, on an
ordinary, thin but crisp and opaque paper, suitable for book work, and on a
thick, creamy writing paper of the same make and watermark as that which
the Province imported for many years for the volumes in which were writ-
ten its acts of Assembly.¹ In this "large paper" edition the Bacon presents a
quiet splendor, a mellow and harmonious blending of paper and types which
was not surpassed in any book printed in colonial America.

In Green's masterpiece of typography there is perceived a lapidarian dig-
nity of intention,a determination, one seems justified in thinking, that these
laws of a free people should be inscribed in a manner worthy of the spirit in
which they had been enacted.

¹ From various evidences one concludes that this was a Dutch paper. The author sent a description of its
watermarks to Mr. G. J. Honig of Laandijk, Holland, who asserted the probability in a courteous reply that this
paper had been made by the house of L. van Gerrevink, at Egmond op de Hoef, near Alkmaar in Noord, Holland.

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