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By Root 1962 0

was all-important. Hall found Rivington's provision of Hume's History inconsistent enough to endanger his own credit with his customers.6 By that point, Rivington's scheme was collapsing. He had indulged too freelyin betting at the Newmarket races, and as part of their campaign against provincial and Scottish "pirates" London's grandees had closed ranks against him too. Fearing ruin, Rivington precipitately declared bankruptcy and fled to America. But he took with him a shipload of books, and was soon back in the same business.? Hall sent his advertisement straight to Strahan, remarking that it revealed "an ingrossing Disposition"; Rivington seemed to think "there never was a Bookseller on the Continent till he came." Still, some rebuttal was needed, he added, or else Rivington would be believed. The reply duly came from the printer Dunlap, who helped himself to an annoyed Rivington's words "in an ironical Way" to compile a counteradvertisement of his own. From distant London too Strahan tried to counter Rivington by telling contacts that a "great Propertyin Copies" allowed Strahan to sell as cheaply as any honest man could.8 But it was the Stamp Act furor that destroyed Rivington's chances. The nonimportation pacts meant that his market dried up. Having also ventured support for the Maryland Lottery- an ill-fated land scheme-he was once more forced into bankruptcy. During the Revolution, Rivingtonwould reappear inyet another guise as a leadingTory newspaperman, serving as king's printer in New York under the protection of British troops (although rumor had it that he was a spy for Washington). After that he would slip into bankruptcy once more and spent his last years in debtors' prison. 9

The successive iterations of Rivington's scheme showed the strategic limits of importing. The reading public in the colonies was expanding to a point where it could not reliably be satisfied by shipping quantities of printed books, even at low Scottish or Irish prices. And at the same time the politics of that public shifted profoundly, to discourage importation from anywhere in the British Isles. Printers and booksellers therefore started to think in terms of reprinting in America. The distant origins of the practice extended back to the seventeenth century, but it accelerated markedly in the 1720s. At that point, one observer noted, Boston already boasted "four or five printing houses which have full imployment, in printing, and reprinting books of one sort or other, that are brought from England and other parts of Europe." America's first major domestic publishing venture was a Bible with a false imprint attributing it to the king's printer in London, and Boston booksellers were still falsifying London and Dublin imprints in the 176os. The relatively few books that Franklin undertook were almost all reprints of works with a proven record in the Old World, the most substantial being Richardson's Pamela.10

The most prominent reprinter before the Revolution was, fittingly, both a Scot and an ex Dubliner. In fact, Robert Bell was probably the only prewar American to make book printing the core of his livelihood. Like Rivington, he hated the London oligarchy. But unlike Rivington he also openly hated the imperial system of which it was a part. Rivington had wanted to co-opt it; Bell wished it destroyed. A native of Glasgow, where he had served his apprenticeship before working for the Berwick-uponTweed pirate Robert Taylor, Bell had moved to Dublin in 1759. There he had set up a reprinting venture radical enough to offend against the courtesies of Dublin's own trade. Facing concerted opposition within the city, he had responded by reprinting Alexander Donaldson's defense of reprinting with the addition of a diatribe ofhis own. Then he promptly took ship for America. Landing in Philadelphia, he had revived his reprinting with a vengeance, honing the anti-imperial character of the enterprise. His best-known American project was William Robertson's three-volume History of Charles V, which he took on in 1771. It was a calculated and highly