James Harper (publisher) - Childhood and Starting in Business

Childhood and Starting in Business

Harper was born in Newtown, New York. As a boy, he read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and decided that he would like to pursue a career as a printer because of Franklin's success in the field. An apprenticeship was subsequently arranged with a family friend, Abraham Paul, who was a partner in the New York printshop of Paul & Thomas. James' younger brother John (22 January 1797 – 22 April 1875) began his printing apprenticeship at another printer in the city within two years. In 1817 the two brothers had learned what they could of the profession and felt that they were ready to try their hand at running their own printing business. In 1817, the brothers founded J. & J. Harper in New York at the corner of Dover and Front streets; James was nearly 22 years old and John was 20. The business was supported by a loan from their father to purchase two Rampage printing presses, some typesetting stock, and simple binding equipment.

In 1817 Paul received an order from the prominent New York bookseller Evert Duyckinck for 2,000 copies of an English translation of Seneca's Morals ("Seneca's morals by way of abstract", translated by Roger L'Estrange and first published in England in 1678.) Paul gave the order to his young apprentices, James and John, who did the printing, working with their younger brothers Joseph Wesley (25 December 1801 – 14 February 1870) and Fletcher (31 January 1806 – 29 May 1877) who aided in setting type, and issued it under the imprint J. & J. Harper. This book was followed in 1818 with an edition of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1818), which they issued under the J. & J. Harper imprint as publisher rather than merely printer.

A description of James from this time can be found in Glyndon G. van Deusen's 1944 essay on Edward Thurlow Weed, an acquaintance and fellow printer:

Harper was a big fellow with a prejudice against liquor, but with such a jovial nature that he became known among the hard drinking printers as "the teetotaler who was never sober". (Glyndon G. van Deusen, 1944)