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Miller & Hutchens, Printers & Book-Binders, and Blank-Book Manufacturers…

Providence: Miller & Hutchens, [ca. 1817?]. Letterpress trade card, 2.5” x 3.5”, manuscript price list for rolls of gold and silver on verso. CONDITION: Very good, light soiling at edges.

A charming trade card of a prominent Providence printing, publishing, and bookbinding firm, evidently printed early in the partnership and advertising the additional service of gilding a range of leather items in silver and gold.

Printer and publisher “Honest John” Miller and bookseller John Hutchens had worked in partnership since at least the early 1810s, and in 1820 established the semi-weekly Manufacturers and Farmers Journal and Providence and Pawtucket Advertiser, which later became the Providence Journal. Miller had been involved in newspaper publishing in the early 1810s, as well, and the pair are identified here as “Printers & Book-Binders, and Blank-Book Manufacturers.” The first of two manicules, beneath their address at the “Corner of Westminster and Weybosset-streets, Whitman’s Block, third story,” points to the firm’s services in a wide variety of printing, from books to checks and labels, and “almost every kind of Book-Binding.” A second manicule indicates their additional capacity in “Gilding, with silver or gold, of Hat Leathers, Belts, &c.” The prices for rolls of gold and silver are noted in ink on the verso, with “2 Rolls Gold” for five and a half cents, one roll for four, a roll of silver for 3 cents, and so on.

Hutchens and Miller went their separate ways in 1823, and the city directory for the following year lists Hutchens on his own as a “Bookseller, Stationer and Book-Binder” at No. 1, Market Square, the location he had shared with Miller since at least 1818 and the address with which they are associated in the American Antiquarian Society’s “Name List of Booksellers' and Bookbinders' Labels.” We locate no other material affiliating them with this evidently early address at Whitman’s Block.

An appealing survival of the printing and publishing scene in nineteenth-century Providence, Rhode Island.

REFERENCES: “The Providence Journal” in Printers and Printing in Providence 1762-1907 (Providence Typographical Union, 1907), pp. 20–33; Providence Directory [and] The Providence Annual Advertiser (Providence: Brown & Danforth, 1824), pp. 39, 5; Field, Edward. State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations at the End of the Century: A History, Vol. 2 (Boston & Syracuse, 1902), p. 579.

Item #10231

Price: $450.00

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