Above and Below: The dictionary's title page is printed in both English and German.
ILLIAM HAMILTON'S greatest claim to fame in the world of academia and science results from his association with Lancaster's best-known educator / pastor / botanist / Renaissance Man: Henry Muhlenberg (Rev. Gotthilf Heinrich Ernst Muhlenberg).
In the 1780s, Muhlenberg became pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church and the first principal of Franklin College, the school that would become Franklin and Marshall College.
In a very-busy, two-year marathon of printing, William Hamilton printed two of Muhlenberg's greatest works, Muhlenberg's 1812 dictionary and his 1813 study of American botany, Catalogus plantarum Americæ Septentrionalis.
Meanwhile, as if he wasn't busy enough, Hamilton spent three months on a military campaign in Baltimore, to defend the city from the British during the War of 1812. He obviously had competent help back home who could run the print shop without him.
This 1812 dictionary is the first German-English dictionary printed in America. In 1904 Frank Diffenderffer labelled this dictionary "the most important work from a typographical standpoint that had so far made its appearance from the Lancaster printers." ...referring to the variety of Roman and fraktur fonts used in this uniquely-important book.
William Hamilton's book-and-broadside printing business eventually evolved into today's Intelligencer Printing Company.