Pioneer Imprints from Fifty States · Roger J. Trienens
TO OUR PATRONS.
The Library also has the only known copy of New Mexico's first book, issued by the same press and dated 1834: _Cuaderno de ortografia. Dedicado a los niños de los señores Martines de Taos._ A metal cut on its title page, oddly depicting a moose, has been traced to a contemporary Boston specimen book, which also displays a pica type identical or very similar to that used in early New Mexican imprints.[95] Authorship of the book has been attributed to Antonio José Martínez (1793-1867), the parish priest in Taos, who arranged to have the press and the printer move there in 1835. From 1826 to 1856 Martínez taught reading, writing, and arithmetic in his parish,[96] and he undoubtedly had this work printed for the use of his own pupils. It is divided into three sections: "De las letras," "De los diptongos, uso de letras mayusculas, acentos y signos de institucion para las citas," and "De la puntuacion de la clausula."[97] The copy of this small book is soiled and worn from much thumbing. Penciled on an inner page in an early, childlike hand is the name "Jesus Maria Baldez." The Library purchased the book in 1931 from Aaron Flacks, a Chicago bookseller, for $350 on the same day that it purchased its earliest Wisconsin almanac (see p. 53, above) and likewise through the intervention of Douglas C. McMurtrie.
Oklahoma When the Cherokee Nation migrated from Georgia to the newly formed Indian Territory, John Fisher Wheeler, who had been head printer of the Cherokee Press at New Echota, proceeded to the Union Mission Station on the Grand River, near the present location of Mazie, Okla. There the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions supplied him with a new press on which in August 1835 he did the first Oklahoma printing. Wheeler had served his apprenticeship at Huntsville, Ala.[98] One of two or three extant copies of the third recorded issue of Oklahoma's first press is present in the Library of Congress collections: _Istutsi in naktsokv. Or The Child's Book. By Rev. John Fleming. Missionary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions._ Printed before October 31, 1835, in an edition of 500 copies, it is a 24-page primer with text in the Creek language rendered in the Pickering alphabet and with woodcut illustrations of animals and other subjects. A Creek Indian named James Perryman or Pvhos Haco ("Grass Crazy") assisted with the translation.[99] Fleming's work among the Indians has earned for him a notice in the _Dictionary of American Biography_, where his "chief claim to remembrance" is said to be "that he was the first to reduce to writing the Muskoki or Creek language, which was a task of peculiar difficulty on account of the numerous and puzzling combinations of consonants involved."
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.