Benjamin Titcomb and Thomas B. Wait introduced printing in the District of Maine, then part of Massachusetts, with the first issue of The Falmouth Gazette and Weekly Advertiser, dated January 1, 1785. Titcomb was a native of Falmouth, now Portland, who had gained his experience at Newburyport, and Wait was formerly employed at Boston.[36]

The Library of Congress possesses nine issues of The Falmouth Gazette from this first year of printing in Maine. Of these the earliest is a partly mutilated copy of the second issue, dated January 8 and featuring a moralistic essay "On Entrance into Life, and the Conduct of early Manhood." This issue contains one piece of news, relayed from a Boston paper, that has importance for American printing history, namely, the arrival in this country from Ireland, "that land of gudgeons," of Mathew Carey, destined to become a leading printer and publisher at Philadelphia. Since the Library of Congress copy is inscribed "Mess^rs Adams & Nourse printers," it is interesting to note that one of the Falmouth news items was reprinted in their Boston paper, The Independent Chronicle, for January 20. Similarly, the Library's copy of the August 13 issue of the Gazette is addressed in manuscript to the famous printer Isaiah Thomas at Worcester, and it retains his editorial markings for the reprinting of two sections—a news item and a poem on atheism—that subsequently appeared in the September 1 and September 8 issues of Thomas's Massachusetts Spy; or, The Worcester Gazette. It was largely by means of just such borrowing amongst themselves that most early American newspapers were put together.

Four of the Library's nine issues, including the Isaiah Thomas copy, were purchased from Goodspeed's Book Shop for $13.50 in 1939. Four of the remaining five, including the very earliest, appear from their physical condition to have a common provenance. The five were listed initially in the 1936 edition of A Checklist of American Eighteenth-Century Newspapers in the Library of Congress.[37]

[36] See R. Webb Noyes, A Bibliography of Maine Imprints to 1820 (Stonington, Maine, 1930), p. 7.