Scripts: Hannah Watson, Hartford Printer

After her printer-husband Ebeneezer died of smallpox in September 1777, Hannah Bunce Watson (1749-1807) entered a business partnership with the young newspaper printer George Goodwin, and the pair published The Connecticut Courant. Running a newspaper in the colonies was no easy feat. Ebeneezer Watson's earlier difficulties obtaining paper resulted in his having to suspend the newspaper's publication for a month (December 1775), during which time he opted to open his own paper mill in Manchester. When that mill burned down three months after his death, Hannah Watson and Sarah Ledyard (the widow of Ebeneezer Watson's partner in the paper mill) appealed to the Connecticut Assembly for aid. Conceiving of the paper mill as a "public necessity," the assembly allowed the two widows permission to raise rebuilding funds through a public lottery.

Watson and Goodwin printed Bernard Romans's Annals of the Troubles in the Netherlands in 1778 with a two-color title page employing a Caslon typeface. William Caslon (1693-1766) designed the type prior to 1725 and by the Revolutionary War period, it was the preferred type in America, used by the Philadelphia printer John Dunlap for the first printing of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). In the example shown here, notice the eighteenth-century long-s in the lower case and its ligature "st" (in the word "most").

For more on two-color printing (focused on the Renaissance), see: Margaret M. Smith and Alan May, "Early Two-Colour Printing." Printing Historical Society Bulletin 44 (Winter 1997/1998): pp. 1-4.

[Pictured above: Bernard Romans, Annals of the Troubles in the Netherlands, vol. I. Hartford, CT: Watson & Goodwin, 1778. Special Collections Department, University of South Florida Tampa Library]