Background
Joseph Alexander Adams was born in 1803 in New Germantown (now Oldwick), New Jersey, United States.
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Joseph Alexander Adams
Edit ProfileEducation
He was largely self-taught, under the encouragement of Dr. Alexander Anderson, America's first wood engraver. His apprenticeship to the printing business, which took place at an early age, was directed by three successive masters.
Career
When he became twenty-one, he went to New York, where he worked for three weeks as a journeyman printer. While still an apprentice, he had made his first attempt at engraving, a cut of a boot which could be used for a newspaper advertisement. In his own words he worked as follows: "I intensely blackened the block with India ink, then marked the outlines of the subject with a point and cut away at it. I had not then even heard of finished drawings being made on the wood. In this manner I worked for about six months. "
Books were not profusely illustrated in Adams's time, and what illustration was used was generally copperplate: nevertheless, in 1831, he was financially able to make a voyage to England, probably incited to do so by the coming to this country in 1829 of Abraham J. Mason, an English engraver on wood, from whom he may have had introductions to Thompson, Bonner, and others.
In 1833 some of his work appeared in the Treasury of Knowledge and in the Cottage Bible.
His "Last Arrow" was engraved in 1837 for the New York Mirror.
He died in New Jersey at the age of seventy-seven.
Achievements
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His sixteen hundred illustrations for Harper's Illuminated Bible constituted his greatest achievement. Linton commends his work for its firm, honest exactness and clearness, and for his graver drawing, mechanism of the art, disposition and perfection of lines. He also was the first electrotyper in America and to have invented several improvements in the process.
Connections
There is no record of his family.
