Newlin Williams: Lyre & Lily

This article, written by Mercer Museum Librarian Terry A. McNealy, appeared in the November/ December 1986 issue of Mercer Mosaic, a Bucks County Historical Society publication which ran from 1984 through 1990. I found the item in our collection (SC-14, #2983) and scanned a sampling of its pages so we could enjoy it in color.

One of the pleasures of processing collections that were acquired by the library decades ago but never catalogued is finding particular items that are revealing of the details of Bucks County's past. One such discovery came in a box of books and other items from the estate of Dr Joseph B Walter of Solebury, a physician, poet and amateur historian who died in 1917. He was a close friend of the Williams family, also of Solebury Township, and the item in question is a small booklet of poems, measuring only three and a half by eight and a half inches. It is called Lyre & Lily, by E Newlin Williams. It is obviously hand-printed, and the cover illustration and other decorations are hand-colored in green and yellow watercolor. Only sixty copies were printed, and the imprint is "The Hedges Print: 1896."

"The Hedges" was the estate of the Williams family on Windy Bush Road, and the Williamses were a remarkable family, interested in photography and other arts as well as printing. Edward Newlin Williams was the youngest of the three children of John S Williams, a prominent farmer whose business interests included the Bucks County Trust Company, the Farmers' and Mechanics' Insurance Company, and the Delaware Bridge Company.

Newlin was born in 1874, and was thus a lad of seventeen when he produced his book of poems. We have not yet found any description of the printing press at The Hedges, but it must have been one of the first, if not the first, private presses in the county.

Private-press printing has a long history, reaching back, for instance, to Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill press near Twickenham, England, in the 18th century. The modern private-press movement, though, concerned not with being a profitable business but with fine design, typography, illustration and production, is generally considered to date from 1891, when William Morris set up the Kelmscott press near London. Thus it seems unusual that only five years later a young Quaker in Solebury was inspired to try his hand at such a venture. His efforts may not compare with those of the great private presses of Morris and the other that followed him in the Arts and Crafts Movement, but he may at least deserve notice in the realm of local history.

We have no knowledge of other productions of The Hedges press. Newlin went on to earn a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1898. (His brother, Carroll R Williams, became a prominent Philadelphia lawyer, but lived at The Hedges.) Newlin, alas, died around the end of January  1902, at the age of twenty-six. (On a trip to New Hampshire, he became lost in the mountains and died of exposure. His body was not found until the end of February.) The Hedges suffered a disastrous fire in later years, so the press and its files have evidently perished. Nevertheless, the Lyre & Lily survives as testimony of one Bucks Countian's early interest in the art of fine printing.