Isaiah Thomas

Isaiah Thomas (January 19, 1749 – April 4, 1831) was an early American printer, newspaper publisher and author. He performed the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Worcester, Massachusetts, and reported the first account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord. He was the founder of the American Antiquarian Society.

Biography

Early life and career Thomas was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was apprenticed on July 7, 1756, to Zechariah Fowle, a Boston printer, with whom, after working as a printer in Halifax, Portsmouth (New Hampshire) and Charleston (South Carolina), he formed a partnership in 1770.

The Massachusetts Spy

The partnership was formed to publish the Massachusetts Spy, and lasted for three months, after which Thomas continued publication alone. For the paper's motto, he chose "Open to all parties, but influenced by none." Initially it came out three times each week, then (under his sole ownership) as a semi-weekly, and beginning in 1771, as a weekly. The paper soon espoused the Whig cause and was the object of government efforts to suppress it. In 1771 Governor Thomas Hutchinson ordered the attorney general to prosecute Thomas, but the grand jury failed to find cause for indictment. Around 1802, Thomas gave his Worcester business over to his son, including the control of the Spy.

Later life

From 1775 until 1803, Thomas published the New England Almanac, continued until 1819 by his son, Isaiah Thomas Jr. It had something of the flavor of Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack. Fully titled History of Printing in America, with a Biography of Printers, and an Account of Newspapers, it was published in two volumes in 1810. A second edition, published in 1874, was prepared by his grandson Benjamin Franklin Thomas and included a catalog of American publications previous to 1776 and a memoir of Isaiah Thomas.

In November 1812, Thomas founded the American Society of Antiquaries, now known as the American Antiquarian Society, partly to take care of the extensive library he had accumulated in preparing his history of publishing. At its first meeting, Thomas was elected president, a role he held until his death.

Thomas spent his final days in Worcester. Upon his death in 1831, he bequeathed his entire library, his collection of early American newspapers, as well as his personal papers and records to the American Antiquarian Society.

Legacy Thomas's grandson B. F. Thomas noted his grandfather's importance in founding the American Antiquarian Society. "He saw and understood, no man better, from what infinitely varied and minute sources the history of a nation's life was to be drawn; that the only safe rule was to gather up all the fragments so that nothing be lost." In 1943, Publishers Weekly created the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing, named in honor of Mathew Carey and Isaiah Thomas.

At a meeting of the American Antiquarian Society held in Worcester on April 15, 1981, the legacy of Thomas was characterized by Marcus A. McCorison as establishing a library on revolutionary principles, one preserving democratic literature and the written materials of a culture in which all sorts of ideas freely circulate and from which precipitate new ideas of the true and beautiful.