John H. A. Bone is a native of Cornwall, England, having been born in that county October 31, 1830. He received a good education, being first intended for the army, but an accident having permanently crippled his right arm, that purpose had to be abandoned. He resided awhile in London and Liverpool, during which time he was connected with the press of those cities, and contributed to periodicals. Having married in his native place, he left England in the Autumn of 1851, for the United States, and after a brief stay in New York, arrived in Cleveland in October of that year.

Early in the Spring of 1857, he joined the editorial staff of the Cleveland Herald, to the columns of which he had for some years previous been a frequent contributor. At the same time he had contributed to the pages of the Knickerbocker Magazine, Godey, Peterson's, the Boston Carpet Bag, then conducted by B. P. Shillaber ("Mrs. Partington,") and G. C. Halpine ("Miles O'Reilly,") and other literary papers of Boston, New York and Philadelphia, as well as to a Cleveland magazine, the New American Monthly, and was a regular contributor to the Cincinnati Pen and Pencil, a handsome weekly magazine of more than ordinary merit that was run for some time under the editorship of W. W. Warden.

Mr. Bone, on joining the Herald, took charge of its commercial, local, amusements and literary departments. As the business of the paper increased he resigned those departments, one after another, to others, and on the retirement of Mr. Harris, transferred his labors to the leading editorial department, retaining charge of the literary department also.

In addition to his daily duties on the Herald, Mr. Bone has found time to furnish papers to the Atlantic Monthly on matters of scholarly interest and historical importance, has for the past three years been on the regular staff of Our Young Folks, contributing to it a number of historical articles, prepared with much care and research, and is an occasional contributor to other periodicals.

Mr. Bone published, about sixteen years ago, a small volume of poems, mostly written in boyhood. His after verses, of various characters, are scattered through newspapers and magazines and have never been collected. With the exception of a few political squibs, he has for some years abandoned verse. A work on the oil regions was issued in 1864, and a second, enlarged edition, was published in Philadelphia, in 1865.

Aside from his professional duties as a journalist and the fulfilment of his engagements as a magazine writer, Mr. Bone's literary tastes are chiefly with the older works of English literature. He is a close student of what is known as Early English, delighting in his intervals of leisure to pick from the quaint and curious relics of the earliest English literature bits of evidence that serve to throw some light on the actual social and intellectual condition of our English ancestors four or five centuries ago. He has been for years, and still is, connected with English literary societies for the bringing to light and publishing for the use of the members, unpublished documents of historical and literary value. Of what is know as Elizabethean literature he has been a diligent student. At present he is connected with the management of the Cleveland Library Association and Western Reserve Historical Society.