Rural Massachusetts Imprints Collection

Background

Operating a capital-intensive business like a printer's shop in a rural setting is not an obvious route to financial success. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, a number of printers tried their hand at printing in rural communities, attempting to make, or supplement, their living by meeting local demand for reading matter.

In many ways, the output of rural printing shops is unlike that of more cosmopolitan printing centers, and is typically restricted to the more popular forms of literature and relatively easy to produce works like broadsides, song sheets, commemorative poems, almanacs, toy books, and, in all likelihood, printed forms. Produced simply, even crudely, with respect to typography, design, and binding, the output of such printers provides an important gauge of the interests and tastes of New England's smallest and poorest communities.

In some cases, the printing history of rural shops can be exceedingly complex. John Metcalf, for example, operated in the tiny town of Wendell between 1812 and 1832, where he specialized in the simplest children's books illustrated chaotically with illustrations derived from sets of woodblocks apparently purchased from an unnamed wholesaler -- the same printing blocks used by his contemporary Ansel Phelps of Greenfield. Metcalf also printed almanacs and one or two larger books. He continued as a printer after moving to Northampton in 1833 and his company remained in business for over a century following his death in 1864.