While hunting information for his doctoral dissertation, A. M. Fazle Kabir discovered two interesting items used by an enterprising shopkeeper in Bengal two centuries ago. One is an advertisement dated 7 October 1780, which describes the difficulties faced by a proprietor of a lending library in a large community with an unsettled population—such as Calcutta was for a long time. The other is the bookplate used by that proprietor to identify books in his circulating library. It is featured on the cover of this issue of the Journal of Library History.

            In addition to the rather usual (for the time) well-nourished classical figures surrounding the stylized library alcove, the bookplate contains several words and numbers. “UTILE DULCI”—the useful with the agreeable—is at the top; “Calcutta 1774” is just below the banner; almost hidden in the lower left is the artist’s name “Shepperd sc.”; and at the foot is “Iohn Andrews’s  / Circulating Library.”

            Fazle Kabir found answers to some questions I asked in the February 1968 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies (27:335-338) in “Bengali Types and Their Founders.”

            Shepperd (or Shepherd) was the 21-year-old engraver for the English East India Company’s (EEIC) mint located at Hooghly, about 30 miles north of Calcutta. Adjacent was the Dutch East India Company’s (DEIC) jurisdiction in Chinsurah, Charles Wilkins, EEIC mint superintendent, was responsible for munitions, coinage, and other metal products, and, later, types. At or near the mint, Shepperd designed and etched the metal plate used to produce the bookplate for the circulating library in Andrews’s Calcutta establishment, which dealt in liquors and other various fine imports (including books) for sale. The circulating library was supported by quarterly subscriptions. I would believe it was located in the (present) Dalhousie Square area. Not far distant, James Augustus Hicky, printer and publisher, announced most of what we know about the Andrews shop in Hicky’s Bengal Gazette, issued 29 January 1780 through 5 January 1782 only. Hicky was too outspoken for Government to tolerate longer.

            A few years earlier, two young men attending Harrow were courting the same young woman. Splicing the Dictionary of National Biography’s comments on each, when Richard Brinsley Sheridan was chosen, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed (then at Oxford) decided to enter EEIC service. He was posted at the Hooghly establishment (and later married the daughter of the DEIC governor at Chinsurah). Though it was not his first publication, in 1778 there appeared Bodhaprakasám sabdasastram . . . A Grammar of the Bengal Language by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. . . . Printed at Hoogly in Bengal M DCC LXXVIII.

            A Grammar of the Bengal Language, long acclaimed as the first book printed in Bengal, is the first book produced anywhere in the world to use bengali types. I reported in 1968 that A Grammar lauds Wilkins, the mint superintendent, for his exceptional type production. The Bengali blacksmith, Panchanan Karmakar, and the die sinker, Joseph Shepperd, are overlooked completely.

            John Clark Marshman was only six or seven years old when he came with his parents to Serampore. The Baptist missionaries, or the Serampore Trio, and their children soon learned to know the local printing establishments, and I have no reservations concerning Marshman’s statement in his The Life and Times of Carey, Marshman, and Ward: Embracing the History of the Serampore Mission, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859). On page 159 of the first volume he wrote, “The first Book in which Bengalee types were used was Halhed’s Bengalee Grammar, printed at Hooghly at the press established by Mr. Andrews, a bookseller, in 1778.” The 1778, of course, belongs with the title. Though on EEIC property, within the fortifications needed for a mint, this was a private printery: Mr. Andrews’s Press. After the success of A Grammar of the Bengal Language it required some steady persuasion to convince the Company to sponsor its own print shop—for even one year. They soon found it advantageous.

            No more than one press was necessary in 1774, and there was but one other in the Presidency of Bengal before 1780—that of Charles Wilkins for the EEIC. When John Andrews had begun printing (both copperplate engravings and small business papers using letterpress) has not been learned. The Grammar was certainly not his first venture! Nor do we seem to know when Andrews opened his circulating library in Calcutta: it could well have been in 1774, or earlier. He would travel with the tides (the usual manner) between Calcutta and Hooghly to attend affairs in the two locations.

            Early in the 1780s a young Scot, John Borthwick Gilchrist, arrived in Bengal and became interested in the Urdu (Hindoostanee / Hindustani) language. He requested permanent retirement from the EEIC’s Medical Service in order to devote himself to production of a diglot dictionary. This I have discussed in the Fall 1978 JLH cover article (13:466-468). Gilchrist began publishing in the late 1780s, but its was 1 August 1798 when he signed his preface. On page xlii of the preface to A Dictionary, English and Hindoostanee . . . (Calcutta: several publishers, 1787-1798), Gilchrist wrote clearly that Shepperd not only helped him with the Urdu types but had assisted Charles Wilkins through the entire process of making and using non-Western types—with not a word of thanks.

            On page 75 of Holmes and Company’s The Bengal Obituary (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1848) is the Joseph Shepperd notice. Burial had been in South Park Street Burial Ground, Calcutta. In 1970 I visited that cemetery. Few eighteenth-century stones remain, either in their original position or side-by-side against the compound walls. The Shepperd memorial was nowhere to be found. The same day I visited St. John’s Church, the old Anglican Cathedral, for which Shepperd had engraved some plates for the cornerstone-laying ceremony. All such plates were missing. Only the holes, into which rivets had been sunk, remained.

            Adding further to Kabir’s article, on my return to the Carey Library in 1968, I found a four-volume set of Thomas Carte’s A General History of England (London, 1752). The verso of each volume’s title page bears a stamped ownership mark: “John Andrews / Houghley 1799.” In 1799, John Andrews was alive and well, residing in the twin communities he had long known—not in Calcutta. Did he then have a small press operating at Hooghly/Chinsurah? It would be interesting to know, for these large villages were soon to be the scene of some exciting local literary activity that included translation, compilation, printing, and publishing. A bit of this is in my paper, “The Literary Hussain Family of Chinsurah/Hooghly, 1800-1850,” included in Proceedings of the 1978 Southwest Conference on Asian Studies, edited by Lester J. Bilsky (Little Rock, Ark., 1979), pages 150-162.

            The bookplate that my 1960/61 Dacca University student, now Dr. Fazle Kabir, found is very likely the oldest extant piece of print (an engraving) from the first press established in Bengal. What other small pieces of business paper were purchased at Mr. Andrews’s shop? And when, exactly, did it begin operation?

Katharine Smith Diehl

Seguin, Texas