Isaac Collins (printer)

Isaac Collins
Engraving portrait of Collins at 60 years of age by John Wesley Jarvis, 1806
Born	February 16, 1746 Centerville, Delaware
Died	March 21, 1817(1817-03-21) (aged 71) Burlington, New Jersey
Residence	Burlington, New Jersey New York City
Occupation	printer, publisher
Parent(s)	Charles Collins and Sarah Hammond

Isaac Collins was a printer, publisher, bookseller and merchant of the early American period. He published the New Jersey Gazette and New Jersey Almanac. He is noted for his 1791 bible, the first family bible published in America.

Collins was born in Centerville, Delaware, on February 16, 1746. He was the descendant of English immigrants that died early in their lives. His father was Charles Collins, a wine cooper from Bristol, England, who was an orphan and had immigrated to America in 1734 at the age of nineteen. When Collins's father immigrated to American he debarked at New Castle, Delaware, an area with a large population of Quakers. Collins' father became a farmer in that area (Brandywine Hundred) near the Pennsylvania border and married Sarah Hammond, an English immigrant from Chester County, Pennsylvania. Collins had a sister (Elizabeth) who never married and was his only sibling. They were close throughout their lives.

Collins had his primary schooling at the Center Meeting House in Centerville and at Friends' school in Wilmington, Delaware. His upbringing was among the local Quakers, who had a type of religion called "Inner Light". Collins and his sister listened to religious works of authors like Robert Barclay, William Penn, and Isaac Pennington - if they followed the traditions of the local Quakers.

Collins's father had married again in 1760, since Collins's birth mother had died sometime before this date. Shortly after this, his father died and his stepmother remarried and moved to another neighborhood. At this time Collins was put under the guardianship of her brother, John Hammond, who was living in Wilmington. He became indentured under the printer James Adams of Franklin and Hall (Benjamin Franklin's old Philadelphia printing firm, run by his former foreman David Hall) in 1761 to work as a journeyman in the printer trade for five years. Since Adams was his master he furnished Collins with not only printing skills (i.e. inking, closing the press) but was also obligated to furnish him in basic schooling in such subjects as reading, writing and arithmetic.