Stephen Daye

Before 1638 nothing connects Stephen Daye to printing. Every source consulted, from the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry to the American Antiquarian Society's own account of the press, agrees on a single trade: he was a locksmith, working in Cambridge, England. On 7 June 1638 he entered into a contract with the Reverend Jose Glover, a nonconforming clergyman who had bought a complete printing press, type and paper in England with money raised from supporters, and who needed hands to move and operate it in the colony he was about to join. The agreement bound Daye, his son Matthew and other members of the household to the journey and to years of labour in consideration of their passage being paid.

Nothing in that contract, so far as the sources consulted describe it, names Daye a printer. He was engaged as labour, alongside three other workmen, for a venture whose actual craft he had no training in. That mismatch, a locksmith placed in charge of the first press in English America, is the fact every later account has to explain away or work around, and most simply do not mention it.

Jose Glover did not live to see his press unpacked. He died of a fever during the Atlantic crossing on the John of London in the summer of 1638, leaving his widow, Elizabeth Harris Glover, the sole owner of the press, the type, the paper and Daye's contract of indenture. She and her household reached Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the autumn of 1638 and set up the press in a house on what is now Holyoke Street, next to the college that would become Harvard.

The historian Leona M. Hudak's assessment, quoted in the standard account of Elizabeth Glover's life, states the relationship plainly: Mrs. Glover was the proprietress or publisher of the press, and Daye was its overseer or manager. That is the correct hierarchy, and the phrase used everywhere since, 'printed by Stephen Daye,' erases it. Elizabeth Glover remarried in June 1641, to Henry Dunster, the newly installed first president of Harvard College, and the press passed under his direction. She died on 23 June 1643, not yet forty-one.

Her ownership was not honorary. After her death her son by Jose Glover sued Dunster over the disposition of her estate and the press within it, and a Middlesex County court eventually ruled in the son's favour, though Dunster kept most of the value regardless. The press that printed the first American book was, for its entire working life under the Daye family, the property of a woman and then of the man she married, never of the men who operated it.

Governor John Winthrop, a contemporary and not a bibliographer, is the source for the order of the press's first three productions, recorded in his own journal: 'The first thing which was printed was the freemen's oath; the next was an almanac made for New England by Mr. William Peirce, mariner; the next was the Psalms newly turned into the metre.' That sequence, oath, almanac, psalter, is the spine of everything that follows.

The Freeman's Oath, a broadside printed in January 1639, was the loyalty pledge required of new colonists admitted to the franchise. No copy of the genuine 1639 printing survives; the text is known only from a handwritten draft and its reprinting in two later books. William Peirce's almanac followed later in 1639 and is likewise lost as an original imprint from that year. The Bay Psalm Book, the third production, is the first of the press's output to survive as an actual physical book, which is why it and not the oath carries the title 'first book printed in British North America.' The distinction between first item printed and first surviving book is real and is dropped by most popular accounts.

This is the real corpus question, and it has never been closed. Stephen Daye had no attested printing background of any kind before 1638. His son Matthew is repeatedly described, in sources going back at least as far as the twentieth century, as a trained printer who had apprenticed in a London printing shop before the family emigrated, and modern popular accounts routinely state that Matthew, not Stephen, actually did the compositing and presswork for which his father is credited. No source consulted, however, produces a surviving apprenticeship record, indenture or Stationers' Company entry for Matthew Daye. One line of speculation held that the family descended from the Elizabethan printer John Daye, which would explain an inherited trade; other scholars find no evidence for the connection at all. The claim of Matthew's London training is old, widely repeated and, on the evidence gathered here, undocumented rather than false.

Bibliographers who have looked closely at the physical evidence disagree even about how many hands were involved. George Parker Winship, whose 1945 institutional history The Cambridge Press remains the standard account of the plant itself, judged the Bay Psalm Book's setting consistent enough that it read as the work of a single compositor. Zoltan Haraszti, examining the book in closer detail for his 1956 study The Enigma of the Bay Psalm Book, reached the opposite impression: that an attentive reading of the text's irregularities suggests a variety of hands rather than one. Neither position, as reported in the sources consulted, names which family member did which part. No signature identifies which family member set which part of the Bay Psalm Book, and the technique that has actually been used on the press's output is a different one: tracing the successive physical states, shifted borders, mid-run corrections, of a single print job across its surviving copies, to reconstruct the order sheets came off the press. Lawrence C. Starkey and, independently, the historian John A. Harrer applied that method to the nine surviving copies of the 1649 Cambridge Platform of Church Discipline, not to the 1640 Psalm Book. No source consulted describes a comparable analysis, of any kind, ever being carried out on the Bay Psalm Book specifically to separate Stephen's work from Matthew's.

What is not in dispute is Matthew's later, independent visibility. His name is the first Daye name to appear on any imprint of the press at all, on the almanac for 1647, seven years after the Psalm Book and after his father is no longer credited with running the shop. Harrer goes further for Matthew's next major job, the 1649 Cambridge Platform: on circumstantial grounds, that a printer facing the certain scrutiny of the colony's clergy and lawmakers would have taken particular care over the one page most likely to be judged, and that title pages were normally composed early rather than last, he argues Matthew personally designed and set that title page before illness ended his work, with Samuel Green completing the job after Matthew's death. That argument concerns a work from 1649, not 1640, and does not by itself resolve who set the earlier book. It does suggest that by the end of his short life Matthew Daye was capable of skilled, deliberate typesetting, which is more than the record establishes for his father at any point.

The title page of the 1640 Bay Psalm Book carries two scriptural epigraphs, from Colossians 3:16 and James 5:13, neither with its verse number given, and closes with the words 'Imprinted 1640.' It does not name Stephen Daye, or anyone else, as printer. His name appears on no book issued from the Cambridge press during his lifetime.

The attribution that fills that gap comes from outside the book entirely. On 10 December 1641 the General Court of Massachusetts Bay granted Daye 300 acres of land, describing him in the grant as 'the first that set upon printing,' though he did not take possession of the land until roughly 1657. That phrase, not any printed colophon, is the closest thing to a contemporary credit line Daye ever received, and it rewards a status, being first, rather than describing an object he made.

The first serious historian of American printing had a personal, undisclosed conflict of interest when he wrote his verdict. Isaiah Thomas, compiling his History of Printing in America, published in 1810, judged that the Bay Psalm Book 'abounds with typographical errors, and does not exhibit the appearance of good workmanship,' and that 'the compositor must have been wholly unacquainted with punctuation.' He wrote that assessment while working from a copy of the very book he was judging, one belonging to the Reverend William Bentley of Salem, which Thomas had borrowed in April 1809, promised to return, and never gave back. Bentley never asked for it either; the volume passed with Thomas's own library to the American Antiquarian Society, which he founded, and it remains there today.

Thomas's verdict has outlived every softer reassessment. Zoltan Haraszti's 1956 study, working through the same physical evidence more than a century later, argued that the press-work was 'not worse than most provincial printing in England' during the disruption of the Civil War years there, and pointed out that the printed list of errata, headed 'Faults escaped in printing,' catalogues only about seven mistakes when a fuller count runs closer to seventy. Both verdicts, the 1810 condemnation and the 1956 contextual defence, are about the same seven-inch quarto, and neither is wrong so much as differently interested: one measuring the book against the craft it claimed, the other measuring it against the circumstances that produced it.

The most commonly repeated account places Daye's dismissal precisely at Elizabeth Glover's death on 23 June 1643, with Matthew installed in his place immediately afterward. A different account, drawn from Haraszti's research, places Stephen's actual retirement two years later, in 1647, with Matthew recognized as the press's sole foreman only for the final two years before his own death. The two accounts cannot both be exactly right, and nothing read for this page reconciles them; it is possible Daye lost authority over the shop in 1643 while continuing some association with it until 1647, but that reading is offered here as a guess at reconciliation, not as an established fact.

Whichever date is correct, the pattern is the same. Stephen Daye's tenure ended not because of a single documented failure but because the two people who might have valued his continued service, Elizabeth Glover and then, implicitly, her heirs, were gone or had moved on, and a more capable operator, his own son, was already in place to take over.

In 1656, years after leaving the press, Stephen Daye sued Henry Dunster for 100 pounds, in what surviving Middlesex County court records describe as a compensation dispute connected to his years of work there. His own sworn testimony survives from that proceeding, in which he states that the paper Jose Glover had originally supplied the press, worth some 60 pounds when purchased in England, was used for printing under Dunster's direction until the press itself was sold to Harvard College, with roughly twelve reams of the remaining stock carried off by Dunster at that point. The court's judgment went against Daye.

A related and more general dispute, an accounting between Dunster and the Glover estate over years of guardianship expenses, was eventually settled by a panel of referees who queried several of Dunster's claimed costs, including years of retained livestock profits, before arriving at a reduced final award in Dunster's favour. Read together, the two proceedings describe a man who ran the first press in English America for the better part of a decade and, near the end of his life, was still trying and failing to be paid properly for it.

No authentic copy of the Freeman's Oath, the first thing the press ever produced, has been seen since the middle of the seventeenth century. Its text survives only indirectly, through a manuscript draft and its reprinting inside two later books, New-England's Jonas Cast Up at London of 1647 and the Massachusetts Book of the General Laws and Liberties of 1648. Generations of collectors held out hope that an original might surface.

One did, in 1985, when the document dealer Mark Hofmann offered a broadside he claimed to have found in a New York bookshop, priced at 1.5 million dollars and initially judged by examiners to contain nothing inconsistent with a mid-seventeenth-century original. Hofmann was, in fact, one of the most technically sophisticated forgers in American history, using period-correct paper, homemade ink and chemical ageing; he later admitted to fabricating hundreds of documents and confessed that for the Oath specifically he had, uncharacteristically, had the printing plate made professionally rather than by his own hand. The fraud came to light only because Hofmann was separately implicated in a pair of pipe bombings connected to his other forgeries, one of them fatal. The first thing Stephen Daye's press ever made remains, to this day, a documented absence rather than an object, which is exactly the condition that made it worth forging.

An estimated 1,700 copies of the Bay Psalm Book were printed in 1640. Eleven are known to survive, five of them complete, and this archive's own record for one of those eleven, the Old South Church copy bought by David Rubenstein, already carries its full provenance and sale history in detail. What belongs here is the comparative picture: across the whole surviving corpus, the book has reached the open market twice in the last century, and both times it set a record.

On 26 November 2013 Sotheby's New York sold the Old South Church copy for a total of USD 14,165,000 with fees, a world record for a printed book. Two contemporary reports, one from ABC News Australia carrying wire-service reporting and one from HuffPost, both state the hammer figure explicitly as USD 12,500,000, with bidding opening at USD 6 million and closing in under five minutes; this archive's own record for that specific copy treats the hammer as a derived rather than a documented figure, because Sotheby's own released sale materials give only the fee-inclusive total, and this page notes both positions rather than picking one. The underbidder was Steve Green of Oklahoma City, of the Hobby Lobby retail family, who had entered a pre-set bid of 12 million dollars intending the book for a planned Bible museum; David Rubenstein, who won it, placed his winning bid by telephone from Australia.

Before that sale, no copy had come to auction since 28 January 1947, when the trustees of the Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Trust sold a different copy, also once the Old South Church's own, at Parke-Bernet in New York for 151,000 dollars, then itself a world record for any printed book, ahead of a Shakespeare First Folio's roughly 77,000 dollars at the same period. A third data point sits well below both: in 1933 the Rosenbach Company bought an imperfect copy, lacking eight leaves including the title page, from James Weatherup, a private owner in Belfast, for 150 pounds, after Weatherup's own itemised description of the book's condition satisfied A.S.W. Rosenbach that it was genuine. A different, more damaged copy, missing nineteen leaves and at that time owned by the Van Sinderen family, shows how fast the book's value climbed regardless of condition: the bibliographer Wilberforce Eames put its value at 50,000 dollars in the late 1930s, a few years after Rosenbach paid 150 pounds for the Belfast copy. Three sales, three centuries apart in the book's life and three wildly different figures, are really one market: there are only eleven of these objects, and the value of each one is set by how few of its siblings will ever be offered again.

The tidy version of this story, a locksmith becomes America's first printer and produces its first book, survives because it is simple and because almost nobody checks the two things that complicate it: whether his name is actually on the object, and whether the historical record is even internally consistent about him.

It is not. The original 1885 Dictionary of National Biography entry for Daye gives his birth year as about 1610, states that he served an apprenticeship in London before Glover engaged him, in language that reads as though the apprenticeship were in printing rather than locksmithing, and describes him becoming a locksmith only after he stopped printing, around 1648 or 1649. That sequence runs backward from the modern consensus, followed by this archive's own Bay Psalm Book record and by Britannica, Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia entries consulted here, which place his birth at about 1594 and his locksmith's trade firmly before his printing years, not after them. A single, fairly authoritative-looking nineteenth-century reference work and the twentieth-century scholarship that followed it disagree about the basic shape of the man's working life, and later popular writing has mostly copied whichever version it found first rather than flagging the conflict.