A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

cious manners, their brilliant plumage give such color to the picture of those
olden days that the observer seldom looks beyond them into the shadows.
He does not see Mary Goddard and her sisters in other cities laboring the
hours through in their dingy shops. To see them there is to realize that the
picture has depth and richness as well as color.

IN CONCLUSION

The colonial period in Maryland printing history comes to an end with
the work of William and Mary Katherine Goddard. After them, and in-
deed in their later years, came so many printers, such a flood of pam-
phlets, books and newspapers that the problem of keeping clear the record
becomes one to be solved by catalogue making rather than by historical
narrative. To the printing houses of Baltimore and Annapolis were added
those of Frederick when Matthias Bartgis settled there in 1779, and of
Easton and Hagerstown when James Cowan and Stewart Herbert set up
their respective presses in these places in the year 1790. Within another dec-
ade or two every Maryland town had its press. To record their activities
is a task so different in character from that which has been attempted in
the foregoing pages that another hand must take it up. The author of this
narrative has lived so happily with the Nutheads, with Reading and Zen-
ger and Parks, and with the Greens and Goddards that he is inclined to
regard with jealousy those who took their places in the years following the
Revolution. Of many of these, there is not much to be said; for the best of
them time and man's perennial interest in the printing craft will find a his-
torian.

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