John Jay Smith papers

John Jay Smith (1798-1881) was an editor and librarian. The son of John and Gulielma Maria (Morris) Smith, he was born on a farm at Green Hill, Burlington County, New Jersey. John Jay Smith attended the Friends' boarding school at Westtown, Pensylvania, and was then apprenticed to a druggist in Philadelphia. In 1821, he married Rachel Collins Pearsall; they had four sons and three daughters.

Smith was active in the establishment of a line of Conestoga wagons, operating as regular carriers between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, but the enterprise was short-lived. In 1827, in partnership with George Taylor, he inaugurated the Pennsylvania Gazette. Two years later, he became librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia; he was a hereditary trustee of the Loganian Library. He gathered for the institution a large collection of autographs and manuscripts relating to the history of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Smith suggested the re-publication of important foreign books in the form of a cheap weekly to Adam Waldie, a Philadelphia printer. Waldie's Select Circulating Library, under Smith's editorship, could be circulated through the mails. This was the first effort in America, on an extensive scale, to take advantage of the absence of international copyright. Within three months the work had a circulation of 6,000 copies a week, and for some years it enjoyed great success. During 1835, Smith edited the Museum of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art. In 1845, Lloyd Pearsall Smith, his son, began the publication Smith's Weekly Volume, a successor to Waldie's. In 1851, Smith retired from his librarianship so that Lloyd might be appointed in his place. His later literary work included the editing of Letters of Dr. Richard Hill (1854) and the authorship of a volume of entertaining gossip, written for his children, which was edited by his daughter and privately printed in 1892 under the title, Recollections of John Jay Smith Written by Himself.

Smith died at his estate, "Ivy Lodge," Germantown, Pennsylvania, at the age of 83.

From: "John Jay Smith."Dictionary of American Biography Base Set. American Council of Learned Societies, 1928-1936. Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC