CONNER, James, type-founder, born near Hyde Park, Dutchess County, New York, 22 April, 1798. In 1814 he was apprenticed to Samuel Brower, and, after learning the trade, worked in different printing-offices in New York City, was a skilful pressman, and, after becoming expert in finishing stereotype plates, took charge of a stereotype foundry in Boston. Returning after three years to New York City, he began business as a printer and stereotype-founder. He made from old stereotype plates, and sold in large quantities, large type that was wanted for posters, manufactured the first folio Bible ever printed in the United States, began to cast type for his own establishment, devising a style of light-faced type that found a large demand, and stereotyped Shakespeare's works and other books, and then a polyglot Bible, for which he designed a new size of type, which he called agate. He next published Walter Scott's works, after which he confined himself to type-founding. He invented a method of casting letters from an electrotyped matrix by chemical precipitation.