A History of Printing in Colonial Maryland

had been printed at Lord Baltimore's expense, there seems no reason for
believing this to be true. The collection bears the royal arms, was printed
by the King's prin ter, and has neither dedication nor preface. There is nothing
about the book to suggest that Baltimore had been ordered to publish it,
and as it contains none of the laws made since the Province had been re-
stored to his government, it is more probably the case that the collection
had been issued by the Lords of Trade from the engrossed copy sent to
them in 1715 as one of that series of colonial laws which they published
customarily for the benefit of those in England who were associated in co-
lonial business enterprises. Similar publications were printed by Baskett,
some of them "by order of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Planta-
tions," for Bermuda and New York in 1719, the Barbadoes in 1721, Mas-
sachusetts in 1724 and Virginia in 1727, to name only the most important
collections of the series.

This London edition of the laws is a handsome book, well printed on a
thick, crisp, white paper. It was printed by John Baskett, who six years
before its publication had acquired unpleasant notoriety as the printer of
an edition of Holy Writ which has been known ever since as the Vinegar
Bible, by reason of the occurrence in its pages of a misprint in one of the
gospels which caused the laborers in the vineyard to be alluded to as the
laborers in the "vinegar." Because of this and other blunders which it con-
tained, it was known to a mocking generation as a "Basket-full of printer's
errors," but in spite of its textual imperfections, Dibdin described it as "the
most magnificent of the Oxford Bibles." Until Jonas Green had printed
Bacon's edition of the laws, Baskett's edition was certainly the most mag-
nificent of the Maryland books of statutory law. That it had little use in
the colonies is easily explained by the nature of its contents and by its date
of publication, for a work published in 1723 containing no laws passed since
1715 could not be expected to prove useful when even the easily available
Jones-Bradford compilation, containing the code of 1715 and subsequent
legislation for the three years 1716-1718, so rapidly became out-of-date
that the Assembly in 1722 attempted to have printed a second volume con-
taining the compiled laws of the intervening years.¹

"TROTT'S LAWS OF THE PLANTATIONS," LONDON, 1721

Several times in the course of this narrative grateful reference has been
made to a special compilation of colonial laws known familiarly as "Trott's
Laws of the Plantations." The Laws of the British Plantations—relating to

¹ See next chapter under the section devoted to Michael Piper and his attempt to establish a press in Maryland.

[46]