The Ties That Bind: A Re-examination of the Career of Hugh Gaine, Printer and Bookseller, at the Bible and Crown, in Hanover Square

Abstract

This thesis re-examines the printing career of Hugh Gaine, an Irish-born and New York-based printer during the second half of the eighteenth century, using the approach of the history of the book. I examine how the colonial printing house developed into a communal space that fostered transatlantic imagined communities with the printer as their facilitator. The role of print as a cultural agent has not gone unnoticed by scholars, but the systems of its production and dissemination remain to be studied in greater depth. Analysis of the development of the colonial American printing house and their printers as facilitators of cultural change allows us to more fully understand the changes in taste and thought that occurred within colonial society during the eighteenth century. The printing house emerged as an intermediate space between colonists’ identity as subjects of the British Empire and an evolving construction of a national American identity.