John Pass (engraver)


John Pass or Paas was an English engraver and murder victim.

Life

Pass was an established copper plate engraver in Pentonville, London. He made plates for The History, Civil and Ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester by John Milner. John Wilkes the London bookseller, who was from Winchester, knew him at the end of the 18th century, and took him on for illustrations of his Encyclopaedia Londoniensis. Pass produced plates for volume 13 of the work.
John Paas was murdered in Leicester by James Cook, in a criminal case that attracted wide attention. He was aged 49, a partner in the firm Paas & Co. of High Holborn, London, engravers. He was in Leicester as a travelling salesman of specialist hardware. Cook, a printer and bookbinder, was exhibited on a gibbet after being hanged, the last British criminal to be so treated.

Paas & Co.

The firm of C. and A. Paas & Co. was in business at various Holborn addresses in the second half of the 18th century. One of the partners, Cornelius Paas, an engraver from Germany, came to London around 1765.