[Illustration: (Hawaiian Primer, printed by Elisha Loomis.)]
Hawaii's first printer was a young American named Elisha Loomis,
previously employed as a printer's apprentice at Canandaigua, N.Y. He
arrived at Hawaii with a group of Boston missionaries in 1820; but use
of the printing press that he brought with him had to be delayed owing
to the lack of a written Hawaiian language, which the missionaries
proceeded to devise. At a special ceremony held at Honolulu on
January 7, 1822, a few copies of the earliest Hawaiian imprint were
struck off: a broadside captioned "Lesson I." Its text was afterwards
incorporated in a printed primer of the Hawaiian language.[79]
Loomis printed 500 copies of the primer in January, and in September
1822 he printed 2,000 copies of a second edition. The latter edition
is the fifth recorded Hawaiian imprint,[80] as well as the earliest to
be found among the Library of Congress holdings. In 16 pages, without
a title page or an imprint statement, it opens with a section headed
"THE ALPHABET" and includes lists of syllables, lists of words, and
elementary Hawaiian readings of a religious character consistent with
their missionary purpose.
The Library's copy is shelved in a special Hawaiiana Collection in the
Rare Book Division. Bound with it is another rare primer in only four
pages, captioned "KA BE-A-BA," which Loomis printed in 1824.[81] The
small volume is in a black, half leather binding, with an old Library
of Congress bookplate marked "Smithsonian Deposit." Since the final
text page is date-stamped "1 Aug., 1858," the volume was probably
received or bound by the Smithsonian Institution in that year. The
Smithsonian transferred most of its book collection to the Library
of Congress in 1866-67 and has continued to deposit in the Library
quantities of material which it receives largely in exchange for its
own publications. The Hawaiian rarities in this particular volume were
cataloged at the Library in 1918.
[Footnote 79: See T. M. Spaulding, "The First Printing in Hawaii,"
_The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America_, vol. 50,
1956, p. 313-327; R. E. Lingenfelter, _Presses of the Pacific Islands
1817-1867_ (Los Angeles, 1967), p. 33-44.]
[Footnote 80: See H. R. Ballou and G. R. Carter, "The History of
the Hawaiian Mission Press, with a Bibliography of the Earlier
Publications," _Papers of the Hawaiian Historical Society_, no. 14,
1908, p. [9]-44.]
[Footnote 81: The penciled note on p. [1], "Second Ed. Spelling Book,"
would appear to identify it with no. 10 in the Ballou and Carter
bibliography.]