A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

a printed broadside, attested officially as a true copy of an Address of the
Maryland Assembly, which, its colophon asserts, was printed in Maryland
during the period when William Nuthead was resident in its capital; that
a Maryland Council minute has been preserved which records a discussion
of the propriety of Nuthead's action in printing or promising to print cer-
tain warrants, and in which the future limits of his printing activity were
prescribed by the councillors; that in his deposition read before this body,
Nuthead confessed to having promised to print five hundred warrants by
noon of the day following the receipt of the order; and, finally, that after
his death in 1695, Nuthead's widow asked and received permission to op-
erate a printing press in the Province, presumably that press which a few
months before had been listed in her late husband's inventory. In view of
these facts, it seems permissible to affirm that the generally accepted chro-
nology of American printing should be corrected by placing the beginning
of Maryland typographical activity in the year 1686 when Nuthead first
was entered on the public pay roll rather than with the coming of William
Parks to Annapolis in 1726. That the forty years by which this change in
chronology extends the printing annals of Lord Baltimore's province were
not barren of interest for the student of American typographical history,
the pages which follow will make clear.

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