by the Phinneys in 1849.

The Phinney establishment became famous for original methods of
conducting business. Large wagons were ingeniously constructed to serve
as locomotive bookstores. They had movable tops and counters, and their
shelves were stocked with hundreds of varieties of books. Traveling
agents drove these wagons to many villages where books were scarcely
attainable otherwise. The Erie Canal opened even more remote fields of
enterprise. The Phinneys had a canal boat fitted up as a floating
bookstore, which carried a variety beyond that found in the ordinary
village, anchoring in winter at one of the largest towns on the Erie
Canal. Up to the year 1849, when the publishing department was moved to
Buffalo, and only a bookstore remained of the Phinney enterprise in
Cooperstown, their efforts had built up in this village a large
publishing business, while they stocked and maintained the largest
bookstores in towns as far away as Utica, Buffalo, and Detroit. As early
as 1820 their stereotype foundry in Cooperstown had cast a set of plates
for a quarto family Bible, one of the first ever made in the United
States, and of which some 200,000 copies were printed. Later they
published Fenimore Cooper's _Naval History_, Col. Stone's _Life of
Brant_, several volumes by Rev. Jacob and John S. C. Abbott which were
household favorites for a generation afterward, not to mention many
school text-books and histories.

The occasion which caused the removal of this publishing business from
the village arose out of the discontent of some workmen whose services
were dispensed with when new power presses were substituted for
hand-work in printing. The entire manufactory was burned at night by
incendiaries in the spring of 1849.

Elihu Phinney, the founder of the business, was the originator in 1796
of _Phinney's Calendar, or Western Almanac_, which was known in every
household of the region, for some three score years and ten. The weather
predictions in this calendar were always gravely consulted. In one year
it happened, through a typographical displacement, that snow was
predicted for the fourth of July. When the glorious Fourth arrived the
thermometer dropped below the freezing point, and snow actually fell, a
circumstance which greatly increased the already reverent regard for
Phinney's Almanac.

A quaint character who established himself in the village before the
coming of Elihu Phinney was Dr. Nathaniel Gott. He was a