The Printer’s Devil | The Devil’s Printer

The Printer’s Devil | The Devil’s Printer won the Staff Choice award in the 86th Regional Exhibition of Art & Craft at the Fitchburg Art Museum in 2022.

You pull a thread, and a seam unravels. There was once a Harvard Indian College, and some of the students, among them sons of the leaders of Christianized Indigenous Wampanoag and Nipmuck peoples, worked as apprentices and translators on the first printing press in North America, housed at the college. James Printer, a.k.a. Wawaus, was a Nipmuck man who worked on the press for much of his life but was rarely credited for his work. Books written about this early press and its imprints either neglected to mention James Printer and his colleagues or, reduced them to a footnote.  Writer, literary scholar, and historian Lisa Brooks writes that after studying at the Harvard Indian College, “James joined the printer Samuel Green at the Indian College, where the colony’s only press was now housed. Recruited by Eliot as a printer’s apprentice, he would help produce the first run of bilingual literature in the colonies, with readers in England and in his home country. Hereafter, the young Wawaus would be known as ‘James the Printer,’ or simply ‘James Printer.’”[i]

The title The Printer’s Devil/ The Devil’s Printer alludes to James Printer’s position as a man caught between two worlds: his own and that of the people who employed him to set the type, manage the press, and assist with the translation of the King James Bible into Wôpanâak, an Algonkian language of which he was a native speaker. By super-imposing images of the press James Printer worked with for much of his life[ii] over images of Wôpanâak words and the only known attribution in print to his life-long work, Santoro engages with what Yinka Shinobare termed the “overlap of complexities” in the life of this bilingual translator and printer during a time in which the English colonists consolidated their political and geographical domination of the varied peoples and lands of the Northeast Woodlands of America. Santoro acknowledges and highlights the work of a seventeenth century Nipmuck printer who used a colonial tool, an English Common Press, to leverage his position in English society to protect his family and kin, highlighting the complex interactions between the early settlers and First Nations peoples.

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[i] Lisa Tanya Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Phillip’s War (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 2019), 86.

[ii] Both before and after King Phillip’s War, a war with disastrous consequences for his family and kin.