A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

year. When one learns that Thomas Reading was printing minor legislative
documents in 1708, one assumes fairly that he was not neglecting the more
important work for which his services had been engaged; that is, the print-
ing of the acts passed at each session of Assembly.

Reference to the petition which William Bladen presented when in 1696
he asked permission of the Assembly to establish a press in the Province
reminds us that it was his intention to make use of that press in printing
the "laws made every Session," and although neither copy of session, laws
as printed by him nor reference to such a copy remains, yet it is quite pos-
sible that the series of Maryland printed session laws began with that which
we have called the Bladen-Reading press at the time of its establishment
in the year 1700. It is not intended, however, to assume upon these con-
jectural grounds that the printing of the annual session laws began in that
year, but it is believed that the evidence which has been brought forward
here indicates their beginning in and continuance for several years after
1704, the year in which Reading was constituted public printer and in which
it was ordered "that he should be yearly considered by the several counties
for the Annual Laws of every Assembly." In consideration of the facts here
presented; namely, that there have been discovered the sheets of the ses-
sion laws of 1706, which Reading printed at the behest of that year's As-
sembly, and that the House journals give strong presumptive evidence that
all of the laws from 1704 to 1708 were printed, and that there exist actual
copies of the Governor's "Speech" and the Assembly's "Answer" for No-
vember 1708, one concludes that Reading was stating a plain truth when in
speaking to the delegates of the "Annual Laws of every Assem bly" he used
the words "the which are all ready to be produced to your Honours." It
would be difficult to construe his words as meaning anything except that
he had printed the annual session laws from September 1704 to November
1708. The sheets of April 1706 having been discovered, there remain to be
unearthed and recorded copies of the separate editions of September and
December 1704, May 1705, March 1707, September and November 1708,
and without doubt of all later sessions to the year of Reading's death in

1713.

READING'S DEATH AND A SUMMARY OF HIS SERVICES

TO THE PROVINCE

The next that we hear of Reading in the Assembly records is that he is
dead.¹ We are able to credit him with having printed two collections of com-

¹U. H. J., November 14, 1713, Archives of Maryland, 29: 252. A discussion in the Upper House as to the best
means to be employed in publishing the laws for the counties, whether on poor parchment or good paper, begins

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