[Illustration: _The Falmouth Gazette and Weekly Advertiser_ (No. 2.)
Saturday, January 8, 1785. (Vol. 1.)]
Benjamin Titcomb and Thomas B. Wait introduced printing in the
District of Maine, then part of Massachusetts, with the first issue
of _The Falmouth Gazette and Weekly Advertiser_, dated January 1,
1785. Titcomb was a native of Falmouth, now Portland, who had gained
his experience at Newburyport, and Wait was formerly employed at
Boston.[36]
The Library of Congress possesses nine issues of _The Falmouth
Gazette_ from this first year of printing in Maine. Of these the
earliest is a partly mutilated copy of the second issue, dated January
8 and featuring a moralistic essay "On Entrance into Life, and the
Conduct of early Manhood." This issue contains one piece of news,
relayed from a Boston paper, that has importance for American printing
history, namely, the arrival in this country from Ireland, "that land
of gudgeons," of Mathew Carey, destined to become a leading printer
and publisher at Philadelphia. Since the Library of Congress copy is
inscribed "Mess^{rs} Adams & Nourse printers," it is interesting to
note that one of the Falmouth news items was reprinted in their Boston
paper, _The Independent Chronicle_, for January 20. Similarly, the
Library's copy of the August 13 issue of the _Gazette_ is addressed in
manuscript to the famous printer Isaiah Thomas at Worcester, and it
retains his editorial markings for the reprinting of two sections--a
news item and a poem on atheism--that subsequently appeared in the
September 1 and September 8 issues of _Thomas's Massachusetts Spy; or,
The Worcester Gazette_. It was largely by means of just such borrowing
amongst themselves that most early American newspapers were put
together.
Four of the Library's nine issues, including the Isaiah Thomas copy,
were purchased from Goodspeed's Book Shop for $13.50 in 1939. Four
of the remaining five, including the very earliest, appear from
their physical condition to have a common provenance. The five were
listed initially in the 1936 edition of _A Checklist of American
Eighteenth-Century Newspapers in the Library of Congress_.[37]
[Footnote 36: See R. Webb Noyes, _A Bibliography of Maine Imprints to
1820_ (Stonington, Maine, 1930), p. 7.]
[Footnote 37: The preface to this edition is dated June 1, 1935. A
sixth issue of the _Gazette_ (March 5) listed here was later replaced
by a better copy from the 1939 purchase.]