William Parts, Public Printer of Maryland and Virginia

THE COMPILED LAWS OF 1727

In spite of the lack of harmony between the Houses in regard to his work,
Parks went quietly forward with the execution of the tasks allotted to him
by their resolutions. The laws of the March Assembly of 1725/26 made
their appearance in course,¹ and on their last page was an advertisement
in which was announced as forthcoming from Parks's press an edition of the
whole Body of Laws from the beginning of the Province down to the year
1726, of which the price to subscribers was to be twenty shillings a copy.
The edition of the collected laws which he proceeded to publish, probably
in the autumn of 1727, was that which was known in Bacon's day as the
"old Body of Laws," and which until the appearance of Bacon's great work
in 1765, remained as the most ambitious production of the Maryland press.²
In comparing it with his own larger and more scholarly edition of the laws,
Bacon was not especially complimentary to the earlier collection. "The Su-
periority of the present Edition," he wrote in his Preface,

"will best appear from a Comparison of it with the last mentioned; which, tho' Pub-
lished (as set forth in the Title Page) by Authority, is in Fact very imperfect, and replete
with Errors: The Printer having used no other Copy of the Laws, made before the Year
1719, than that of Bradford's Edition, which was published without any Authority; and
consequently hath adopted, as may appear in several Instances, the Blunders of that Edi-
tion: Which, together with its own Mistakes, make up a considerable Number."

It may have been that the considerable number of mistakes which he
found in "the old Body of Laws" taught Bacon the desirability of making
transcripts for his collection from the original acts, so that through the
blunders of Parks and Evan Jones he attained a height of editorial grace
not reached, or even striven for perhaps, by his predecessors.

THE BEGINNINGS OF A LITERARY TRADITION IN MARYLAND

William Parks became almost immediately an important member of the
provincial society. To give opportunity for discussion of public affairs, to
attempt to form public opinion, are not functions belonging only to the
modern newspaper and publishing house. In the Maryland Gazette, which
he began in 1727, Parks plunged to the heart of the economic problems fac-
ing the Province, and among the early issues of his press was a pamphlet
in which the absorbing question of American politics, the question of the

¹ Copy of this edition of the session laws in the Maryland Diocesan Library, Baltimore, is the only one known.

² In his Maryland Gazette for December, 17, 1728, Parks advertises that he has left a few copies of the Body of
Laws at the regular price of a pistole each. He vents his vexation against those pluralists in office who have hurt
his sales of the book by selling their own duplicates. In the course of the notice, he says that the work was ad-
vertised for publication more than a year ago, which means that it had been published probably in the autumn
of 1727.

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