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or printing-press, which had cost £50, and was the gift of friends in Holland to the new community in 1638, the name-year of Harvard College. Governor Winthrop in his journal tells us that the first sheet printed on this press was the Freeman's Oath, certainly a characteristic production; the second an almanac for New England, and the third,
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The Bay Psalm-Book.
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The Bay Psalm Book could hardly have been struck off. Diversity and grotesqueness of spelling were of course to be expected, and paper might have been coarse without reproof, in that new and poor country; but the type was good and clear, the paper strong and firm, and with ordinary care a very presentable book might have been issued. The punctuation was horrible. A few commas and periods and a larger number of colons were
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_à la_ Timothy Dexter, apparently quite by chance, among the words. Periods were placed in the middle of sentences; words of one syllable were divided by hyphens; capitals and italics were used after the fashion of the time, apparently quite at random; and inverted letters were common enough. The pages were unnumbered, and on every left-hand page the word
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Psalm in the title was spelled correctly, while on the right-hand page it is uniformly spelled
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Psalme.