To Thomas Jefferson from Robert Adam, 8 August 1791
From Robert Adam
Providence. August. 8. 1791
Sir
Inclosed I have the Honour to transmit you a Copy of a New Work, of which I am the proprietor, and of which I have already lodged a Copy in the Office of the Clerk of the District Court agreeable to Law. I am Sir, with due Respect, Your Most Obedient And Most Hble Servt.,
Robert Adam
RC (DNA: RG 59, MLR); endorsed by Remsen as received 16 Aug. 1791 but not recorded in SJL.
The enclosed new work was a new edition of Alexander McDonald’s (1752?–1792) The Youth’s Assistant; being a plain, easy, and comprehensive guide to practical arithmetic: containing all the rules and examples necessary for such a work, of which several editions were issued between 1785 and 1795. The copy enclosed with the above letter was that described in the copyright entry (DNA: RG 21, Records of the U.S. District Court, Federal Records Center, Waltham, Mass.) and recorded in Evans No. 23521 as “Lately published” by Bennett Wheeler in Providence in 1791 (citing United States Chronicle for 22 Dec. 1791).
Robert Adam, with Thomas Collier, was printer of the weekly Litchfield Monitor in 1788–1789. The first edition of McDonald’s Youth’s Assistant was printed and sold by John Trumbull in Norwich in 1785 and the next by Adam’s partner Thomas Collier at Litchfield in 1789 (Evans Nos. 19066 and 21928).