John Foster was an American engraver, printer. He is considered to be the earliest wood-engraver of English America and the first letterpress printer in Boston and the second in New England.
Background
John Foster was born in 1648 in that part of Dorchester, Massachusetts, which later became South Boston, and was baptized on December 10, 1648, by Richard Mather. He was the second son and fourth child of Topestill and Mary (Hates) Foster.
His father was a brewer and a member of the General Court. His mother was the daughter of James Bates who came from England in 1635, was several years a selectman of Dorchester, and in 1641 represented Hingham in the General Court.
Education
John Foster graduated from Harvard in 1667.
Career
After his graduation from Harvard in 1667, two years later, probably in October, John Foster began teaching English, Latin, and writing in his birthplace. As early as 1671 he “took up engraving as an avocation, ” and became the earliest wood-engraver of English America. A few years later he bought a printing-plant which Marmaduke Johnson had fitted out just before his death. Foster took over the establishment and early in 1673, starting business “over against the Sign of the Dove, ” became the pioneer printer of Boston.
He had no training in his art, but had picked it up by observation at Samuel Green’s shop in Cambridge, and although his career as a printer lasted less than seven years (1675 - 81), in that time the issues of his press amounted to about fifty pieces.
He printed fifteen pieces by Increase Mather; two each by James Allen, John Eliot, William Hubbard, Benjamin Reach, Thomas Thachcr, Samuel Willard, and Roger Williams; an edition of the poems of Anne Bradstrcct, and some shorter pieces of verse.
Eighteen of his publications were sermons, three were historical works, and three broadsides. Of the latter, one on the smallpox and measles was the earliest treatise concerning a medical subject printed in the colonies.
In addition to these works he compiled annual almanacs (1675, 1676, 1678 - 81) for which he made his own astronomical calculations. He wrote a paper on “Comets, their Motion, Distance and Magnitude, ” for his almanac of 1681, together with “Observations of a Comet seen this last Winter 1680. ”
He had a smattering knowledge of medicine and in his will left some Medicinal Books. ”
Foster died of tuberculosis at Dorchester in his thirty-third year, and his memory was honored by two printed funeral elegies in verse. His interment was in the Dorchester burying-ground.
By his last will, dated July 8, 1681, when his body was “weak and languishing, ” but his “understanding not distempered or impaired, ” he ordered his printing-press and appurtenances at Boston to be sold to pay his Boston debts, his funeral expenses, and to provide twenty or thirty shillings "to pay for a pair of handsome Gravestones. ” His house at Dorchester he left to his widowed mother, who was his sole executrix. At his death the value of his estate amounted only to something over a hundred pounds.
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Richard Holman explains that Foster's frustration with the bad quality of Cambridge printer Samuel Green on Foster's almanac during 1675 prompted him to give it a try as printer. Holman adds "perhaps Foster looked at the title page and decided that a bright Harvard man could certainly do better. "