“The battered dictionary,” says Dr. Nichols, “and the ink-stained Bible which he found in Fowle’s office started him in his career, and the printing-press, together with an invincible determination to excel in his calling, carried him onward, until he stands to-day with Franklin and Baskerville, a type of the man who with few educational advantages succeeds because he loves his art for his art’s sake.”

In supplying to American children a home-made library, Thomas, although he did no really original work for children, such as his English prototype, Newbery, had accomplished, yet had a motive which was not altogether selfish and pecuniary.  The prejudice against anything of British manufacture was especially strong in the vicinity of Boston; and it was an altogether natural expression of this spirit that impelled the Worcester printer, as soon as his business was well established, to begin to reprint the various little histories.  These reprints were all pirated from Newbery and his successors, Newbery and Carnan; but they compare most favorably with them, and so far surpassed the work of any other American printer of children’s books (except possibly those of Bache in Philadelphia) that his work demands more than a passing mention.

Beginning, like most printers, with the production of a primer in seventeen hundred and eighty-four, by seventeen hundred and eighty-six Thomas was well under way in his work for children.  In that year at least eleven little books bore his imprint and were sent to his Boston agents to be sold.  In the “Worcester Magazine” for June, 1786, Thomas addressed an “Advertisement to Booksellers,” as follows:  “A large assortment of all the various sizes of CHILDREN’S Books, known by the name of Newbery’s Little Books for Children, are now republished by I. Thomas in Worcester, Massachusetts.  They are all done excellently in his English Method, and it is supposed the paper, printing, cuts, and binding are in every way equal to those imported from England.  As the Subscriber has been at great expense to carry on this particular branch of Printing extensively, he hopes to meet with encouragement from the Booksellers in the United States.”

Evidently he did meet with great encouragement from parents as well as booksellers; and it is suspected that the best printed books bearing imprints of other booksellers were often printed in Worcester and bound according to the taste and facilities of the dealer.  That this practice of reprinting the title-page and rebinding was customary, a letter from Franklin to his nephew in Boston gives indisputable evidence: 

     Philada.  Nov. 26, 1788.

     LOVING COUSIN: