James Johns Papers

Prolific pen-printer, amateur publisher and local antiquarian, James Johns was born in Huntington, Vermont, on September 26, 1797. He received only a rudimentary education in the local schools and for most of his life eked out a meagre living as a farmer, but in his early teens he began to issue small quill-and-ink productions designed to resemble printed or published works. Johns maintained his interest in pen-printing from the 1810s to the end of his life, writing out stories, poems, essays, local history and folklore, acrostics, and political commentary in a small, precise lettering that closely resembled a printed type-face. While The Vermont Autograph and Remarker, a small "newspaper" that began in the 1830s and continued into the 1870s, was his best-known manuscript work, Johns also pen-printed broadsides, pamphlets and small books to send to the small circle of Vermont collectors, historians and writers who occasionally gave him books or nominal sums of money in appreciation of his efforts.

In addition to his pen-printing, Johns also occasionally put his writings into published form. In 1828 he had a Burlington printer issue The Green Mountain Muse, a thin volume of poetry. In 1857 he purchased a portable printing-press, which he used for the next decade to churn out occasional broadsides, small pamphlets and other amateurish publications on local subjects. His strong interest in Huntington's early history brought him to the attention of Abby M. Hemenway in the 1860s, and Johns became the author of the Huntington section in her Vermont Historical Gazeteer. In 1868 Johns moved from Huntington to nearby Starksboro, where he died on April 26, 1874, at the age of 76.