Declaration of Independence | Philadelphia, 8 July 1776, first book-form printing
One of the earliest printed appearances of the Declaration of Independence and the first printing of the Declaration in book form, produced in Philadelphia by Robert Bell within days of its adoption by the Continental Congress.
“In Congress, July 4, 1776. A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress assembled,” pp. 41–46 in The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution. Carefully collected from the best Authorities; with some Observations, on their Peculiar Fitness, for the United Colonies in General, and Pennsylvania in Particular. By Demophilus. Philadelphia: Printed and sold by Robert Bell, [8 July] 1776.
Octavo. With the scarce terminal advertisement leaf. Title page with a small loss to the upper fore-edge corner, professionally restored; early leaves creased from handling; occasional marginal tears carefully repaired without significant loss of text. Preserved in modern half morocco. A remarkably sound survival of a Revolutionary pamphlet printed and circulated during the extraordinary events of July 1776.
The Declaration had been formally adopted by Congress on 4 July. That evening and into the morning of 5 July, John Dunlap, printer to the Continental Congress, produced the celebrated broadside edition, the first printing of the text. It next appeared in the Pennsylvania Evening Post on 6 July and in Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet on 8 July. At almost precisely the same moment, Robert Bell incorporated the Declaration into a political work already passing through his press, creating the first appearance of the Declaration in book form.
The dating to 8 July is unusually secure. The terminal advertisement leaf is itself dated “Philadelphia, July 8, 1776”, while advertisements appearing on 9 July in the Pennsylvania Evening Post and on 10 July in the Pennsylvania Gazette announced that the book had been “just printed, published and now selling by Robert Bell.”
Bell’s decision to add the Declaration appears to have been made while The Genuine Principles was already on press. Four additional leaves were appended to accommodate the text, preceded by a newly composed conclusion declaring that the events which had produced the Revolution could not be better expressed than in the Declaration of American Independence. It is therefore not simply an early reprinting of the Declaration, but an immediate response to the political events unfolding around Bell’s Philadelphia printing house.
The context of its publication is remarkable. On the very day Bell’s edition appeared, 8 July 1776, Colonel John Nixon publicly read the Declaration in the yard of the Pennsylvania State House, now Independence Hall. New York had not yet formally approved Congress’s action; that came the following day, 9 July. Only on 19 July, after all thirteen colonies had signified their approval, did Congress order the Declaration to be engrossed on parchment under the title “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America”. Most delegates signed that famous parchment on 2 August.
The Bell printing therefore preserves the Declaration at a fundamentally different moment from the familiar signed parchment. It belongs to the first days in which independence was being announced, printed, read aloud and argued over, before the Declaration had assumed the ceremonial form by which it is known today.
Its surrounding text is equally significant. The Genuine Principles, published pseudonymously as the work of “Demophilus” and probably written by the radical Pennsylvania politician George Bryan, was intended to influence the constitutional convention about to assemble in Philadelphia. Bell thus placed the newly adopted Declaration directly within the contemporary debate over what form of government should replace British rule. Pennsylvania’s convention convened only a week later, on 15 July, with Benjamin Franklin presiding.
Robert Bell himself stood at the centre of Revolutionary print culture. Only six months earlier he had been the original publisher of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the pamphlet that did more than almost any other publication to move colonial opinion towards independence. His printing of the Declaration in book form therefore creates a remarkable physical link between two of the foundational texts of the American Revolution.
Surviving copies are rare in commerce. When Sotheby’s offered an example in 2021, it noted that only three other copies had appeared at auction since the Streeter sale. A further example sold at Christie’s in January 2026 for $431,800, demonstrating the continuing importance attached to this exceptionally early printing.
One of the foundational pieces of Revolutionary American printing: the first appearance of the Declaration of Independence in a book, published in Philadelphia on 8 July 1776, while the Revolution itself was still unfolding.
Evans 14734; Hildeburn 3372; Howes B900; Matyas 76-01; Sabin 26964; Streeter 778.
