[BITList] Joseph Moxon, globe maker

[John Feltham]

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Moxon,  Joseph  (1627-1691), printer and globe maker, was born at Wakefield, Yorkshire, on 8 August 1627 and said to have been briefly educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Wakefield. His father, James, an extreme puritan, was largely domiciled in London from 1622, migrated to Delft in 1636, and in 1638 moved to Rotterdam to print English Bibles. Joseph accompanied his father and learned the printing trade. Following the parliamentary triumph the family returned to London. With his elder brother James, Joseph Moxon was admitted by patrimony to the Weavers' Company by September 1646, and eighteen years later was elected to the livery. By September 1646 the brothers were established as printers in London, and within three years a dozen books appeared with their imprint, all but one of a puritan nature. The exception, A Book of Drawing, Limning, Washing or Colouring of Mapps and Prints (1647), for the map seller Thomas Jenner, presaged Joseph Moxon's future career. From 1650 his brother continued printing on his own.

Joseph Moxon married Susan Marson (d. 1659) on 17 February 1648; they had a daughter, Susan, baptized in June 1650, and a son, James. He married secondly, on 8 June 1663, Hannah Cooke, and for a third time in 1668. By 1650 he had begun to study globe and map making and topics in practical mathematics. He visited Amsterdam in the spring of 1652, commissioning an engraver to cut copper globe-printing plates. Later that year, in partnership with John Sugar, he advertised celestial and terrestrial globes of almost 15 inches diameter. At the Sign of Atlas, Moxon built up a business printing maps, charts, globes, and paper mathematical instruments and publishing popular scientific books. His first premises were in Cornhill, and from 1665 to 1686 he was at Ludgate Hill-excepting a six-year enforced move to Russell Street following the great fire of 1666.

Moxon's first independent publication was his translation of William Bleau's Institutio astronomica, published in 1654 as A Tutor to Astronomy and Geography. Between then and 1684 he published more than thirty popular scientific expositions and technical handbooks. A number, such as Vignola, or, The Compleat Architect and A Tutor to Astronomie ..., or, Use of both the Globes (he was the author of both), ran to several editions in his lifetime. Moxon gained a reputation for printing mathematical texts (John Dansie's Mathematical Manual, 1654, and Edward Wright's Certain Errors in Navigation, 1657), and particularly of tabulated data (his tables of solar declination, Primum mobile, 1656, reprinted in John Newton's A Help to Calculation, 1657, together with tables of logarithms); he also set the 230 pages of trigonometrical functions and logarithms in William Oughtred's Trigonometria (1657).

Moxon was sufficiently respected by the London mathematical community for thirteen of them to support his petition to Charles II for appointment as hydrographer 'for the making of Globes, Maps and Sea-Platts'-an appointment granted in January 1662. Supporters included three fellows of the Royal Society (Elias Ashmole, Lawrence Rook, and Walter Pope), all known for their royalist sympathies-a counter-weight to James Moxon's reputation as a puritan printer.

As a typefounder, Moxon cut and cast the symbols for John Wilkins's Essays towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668). He designed new roman and italic alphabets, printing a specimen sheet, Proves of Several Sorts of Letters Cast by Joseph Moxon, in 1669. It is the first complete English type specimen known. Typographical innovation continued with the special symbols used in John Adams's Index vilaris (1680) and the Irish characters commissioned by Robert Boyle for the 1681-5 printing of the Bible in Irish.

Moxon's election to the Royal Society in November 1678 is remarkable for the fact that he was the first tradesman to join the fellowship, a precedent not repeated during the seventeenth century. As hydrographer royal and as a printer and publisher, he had a reputation long known to many fellows. His election is probably linked to the January 1678 publication of the first part of Mechanick Exercises, or, The Doctrine of Handy Works ... of the Smiths Trade. In a sequence of fourteen parts, Moxon printed illustrated accounts of the trades of the smith, joiner, carpenter, and turner. In July, John Evelyn presented six numbers to the president of the Royal Society. No doubt they created an impression as an exemplar for the languishing programme for a 'history of trades' which the society had begun in the 1660s. Moxon was initially an active member. However, he was one of twenty-three expelled in November 1682 for failure to pay subscriptions.

Moxon speedily added the honorific 'Member of the Royal Society' to 'Hydrographer to the King's Most excellent Majesty' on the title-pages of his books, and retained it despite his expulsion. It appears on his most famous work, Mechanick Exercises: ... Applied to the Art of Printing, published in twenty-four numbers in 1683-4. Here he details all aspects of printing techniques of his day, capturing for posterity the unrecorded tacit craft skills. The value of the text is not that it explains technical innovation-there is none-but it is the precise record of the printing trade seen through the eyes of a practitioner.

In or shortly after 1686 Moxon ceased to trade, and moved to Warwick Lane to dwell with his son, James, a map engraver. He died in February 1691 and was buried in St Paul's Churchyard on 15 February. James Moxon continued to sell his father's globes and instruments and also republished books from his list. With the mathematical instrument maker Thomas Tuttell, he added a section on mathematical instruments to the third (1700) edition of his father's Mathematical Dictionary (1678), the first English-language dictionary devoted to the terminology of mathematics.

D. J. Bryden 

Sources  J. Moxon, Mechanick exercises, or, The doctrine of handy-works, 2 (1683); repr. as Mechanick exercises on the whole art of printing (1683-4), 3rd edn, ed. H. Davis and H. Carter (2003) + S. Tyacke, London map-sellers, 1660-1720 (1978), 126-7 + G. Jagger, 'Joseph Moxon, FRS, and the Royal Society', Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 49 (1995), 193-208 + M. Hunter, The Royal Society and its fellows, 1660-1700: the morphology of an early scientific institution, 2nd edn (1994) + D. Bryden, 'The instrument-maker and the printer: paper instruments made in seventeenth century London', Bulletin of the Scientific Instrument Society, 55 (1997), 3-15 + D. Bryden, 'Capital in the London publishing trade: James Moxon's stock disposal of 1698, a "Mathematical Lottery"', The Library, 6th ser., 19 (1997), 293-350 + D. J. Bryden, 'A 1701 dictionary of mathematical instruments', Making instruments count, ed. R. G. W. Anderson, J. A. Bennett, and W. F. Ryan (1993), 365-82
Likenesses  engraving, 1686?, repro. in J. Moxon, A tutor to astronomy, or, The use of both the globes, 4th edn (1686), frontispiece · F. H. van Hove, engraving, pubd 1692, NPG [see illus.]
Wealth at death  £39: Davis and Carter, eds., Mechanick exercises



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