Part 1

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THE BOOKBINDER in Eighteenth-Century _Williamsburg_

An Account of his Life & Times, & of his Craft

_Williamsburg Craft Series_

_WILLIAMSBURG_ Published by _Colonial Williamsburg_ MCMXC

_The Bookbinder in Eighteenth-Century_ Williamsburg

In October 1770 the inventory of the personal estate of Lord Botetourt, His Majesty's Governor General of Virginia, contained a catalogue of books in the library at the Palace, made after his death by his executors. The shelves held over three hundred volumes. Today this library has been recreated by Colonial Williamsburg using the inventory list and other information on books in print at that time. The actual library of Lord Botetourt was sent back to England--and was lost at sea.

Much about the Governor can be deduced from the books he owned--plus a few he had borrowed and neglected to return. His interests ranged over the whole field of human knowledge, with particular emphasis on history, literature, law, and politics. However, it is not with the substance but with the form of these volumes in the renewed library that we are concerned. For us the important fact is that, with a few exceptions, they are eighteenth-century books _in eighteenth-century bindings_.

The visitor who pauses only for a moment to look at them will see that most of them share certain outward characteristics:

They are bound in leather, with brown calfskin predominant;

Their spines are crossed by a number of horizontal ridges;

The title (abbreviated) usually appears in gold leaf on a small panel of colored leather glued to the spine, and sometimes the author's name, too;

The spine may also bear a moderate amount of decorative gold tooling; and

The sides of the volumes, where visible, are likely to display "blind" tooling, which means ornamental indentations in the surface of the leather, made without gold leaf.

These are the five most noticeable characteristics of books bound in the eighteenth century in England or in England's North American colonies. Standards of workmanship were on the whole higher in the mother country, but binders on both sides of the Atlantic used the same basic methods of bookmaking.

The techniques of bookbinding, in fact, had not changed much for a very long time. Men like William Parks, John Stretch, and Thomas Brend bound books in eighteenth-century Williamsburg in essentially the same way as had their predecessors in medieval monasteries a thousand years before.

Incidentally, among bookbinding craftsmen one does not mention "machine binding"; to the true binder there is no true binding _except_ by hand. The machines of a modern bindery do not "bind" a book according to the craft tradition, but "case" it. Therefore, the words "bind," "bookbinding," "bound books," and so on whenever used in this pamphlet always refer to the traditional hand operation, never to the machine process or product. And "bookbinder" herein is always the hand craftsman, never the machine operator.

_AN ANCIENT "ART AND MYSTERY"_

Man learned to write long before he learned to make paper. Smooth stones, clay tiles, and wax tablets, among other surfaces, were early precursors of scratch-pads and typewriter bond. Later, but before the modern form of a paged book developed, written records were most often kept on long rolls of papyrus, parchment, or vellum--the latter two being much alike.

The lines of writing sometimes ran the entire length of these rolls, sometimes they ran crossways, and sometimes they paralleled the long edge but were divided into columns. The third arrangement is still used in Jewish scrolls of the law, which are kept on rollers, one at each end.

Such a long strip could, however, be folded accordion-like instead of being rolled up. If the folds were made between the columns of writing, each column became a page and the whole began to resemble the book we are familiar with today.

At first these rudimentary books were protected by wooden boards pasted to the first and last pages. As a next step holes were stabbed through every page near the left-hand fold, and a cord or thong laced through the holes held the "accordion" together along one side.

By the fifth century a method had come into general use of sewing individually folded sheets together one by one, not to each other but to a series of flexible "hinges." These were usually narrow strips of leather--four, five, or sometimes six depending on the height of the book--laid across the folded edges of the pages. Linen thread sewed through the folds and around each cross-strip in turn held the pages firmly in place. Wooden boards affixed to the thongs as well as pasted to the first and last pages protected the whole, sometimes with the help of metal clasps and even locks.

To guard the leather crossbands and linen thread from exposure and wear, it then became customary to cover the spine of the book with a wide, vertical strip of leather. Later, for better appearance and greater protection, the leather covering was extended partway onto the boards (the so-called "half-binding" of the medieval period) and then all the way.

Thus was developed and perfected the bound book: a collection of folded sheets sewn together flexibly and protected between covers. Its physical structure was largely the creation of monastic craftsmen of the early Middle Ages, just as its literary content throughout that period was most often religious scripture or comment.

_BOOKS CAN BE BEAUTIFUL_

Speaking only of quality of materials and workmanship, a book may be bound just as well in a simple cover as in an ornate one. Fine binding does not require adornment. It does require the services of a man of high skill and matching integrity, whose handiwork will inevitably display the quiet beauties of intrinsic quality.

But in the hands of men who possess the spark of creative artistry, bookbinding can be more than pure craft work. Although the binder's decorative tools are forever prefixed, each to reproduce its own set and simple pattern, they are infinitely flexible in the ways they can be combined. It is not the tool that makes a binding beautiful or ugly, but the hand that holds the tool--and even more the mind and eye that guide the hand. The history of bookbinding is studded with the names of men who were true artists in leather. For them the most rewarding commission a customer could give was a simple order to dress some work of lasting worth in a binding of appropriate beauty.

In the Middle Ages all books were rare and valuable. Each volume was entirely lettered by hand and its pages were customarily "illuminated" with elaborately drawn initial letters and gilded marginal decorations. The binding of such a book was likely to be as painstakingly ornate as were its pages, and a few bindings were quite valuable in themselves. Before full leather covers became standard, the boards of some manuscript volumes--especially for a church altar or a royal library--might even be encased in beaten gold or silver and encrusted with enamel and semiprecious stones.

The invention of printing from type, as everyone knows, had extremely far-reaching consequences on the spread of public education and enlightenment. It had also some effects that were not so desirable. In the didactic phrase of the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, "Printing brought small books, cheap books, ugly books."

Now it cannot be denied that most books today are smaller than the great manuscript tomes of the monastic scholars. They are cheaper, too. But it would be wrong to say that all books bound since Johann Gutenberg's day have been ugly. To be sure, introduction of the printing press increased the flow of work to the bindery. But if the binder could no longer lavish time and care on every volume, he could still devote high artistry to an occasional book, steady craftsmanship to all.

Innumerable examples from the hands of many binders since the fifteenth century attest that the cover of a printed book can be as beautiful as that of a manuscript book. The names of Nicholas Eve, Clovis Eve, "Le Gascon" (otherwise unknown), and Geoffrey Tory of sixteenth-century France, and Padeloup and Le Monnier in the eighteenth century, deserve mention. In England bindings are not as easily identified with their binders, but the names of Thomas Berthelet, royal binder to Henry VIII, and above all Samuel Mearne, binder to Charles II, stand out. Roger Payne was England's most distinguished binder in the eighteenth century.

Before the fifteenth century, European binders usually had worked ornamentation into leather "in blind," that is, without gold leaf. The technique of applying gold seems to have been perfected by Islamic leatherworkers of Mediterranean Africa, and brought from Morocco to Europe via Spain and Italy. Sixteenth-century French binders carried this kind of adornment to a peak of intricate tooling and lavish gilding. Their English counterparts, while they imitated the French, tended to favor simpler designs and less gold leaf. In the late seventeenth century and continuing through the eighteenth, straight lines rather than curves became characteristic of English work.

For example, the broken lines of the "cottage" style credited to Samuel Mearne resembled an outlined roof and walls. Later the "Cambridge" style became popular in England. It consisted of a vertical panel of thin lines (fillets) on the sides of the book, with flower or leaf ornaments (fleurons) at the corners and perhaps in the center, and a narrow lace border around the boards. The example illustrated indicates that colonial binders continued to favor the Cambridge design until well into the eighteenth century.

Around 1760 a Dutch binder developed a method of treating leather with acid to give it a marbled appearance, and other binders lost no time in prying the secret away from him. First among binders in England to learn the technique was an émigré German, John Baumgarten, who made the most of his advantage. As Thomas Jefferson wrote to Robert Skipwith in 1771, books "bound by Bumgarden in fine Marbled bindings" cost 50 per cent more than in plain bindings.

In addition to national styles and local designs that developed at various times and places, certain binders perfected individual patterns of their own. In some cases these were so unique as to be almost certain evidence that a book so decorated was bound by the man in question. But not always. As in the case of Samuel Mearne, work identified with the master might actually have been done under his instruction by a journeyman in his shop.

Among the very large number of eighteenth-century bindings that survive, the great difficulty is to identify with any certainty the binder of a particular volume. In many instances--perhaps most--it is impossible to be absolutely sure on this point. Except in France, binders of the eighteenth century, or any period, who signed or labeled their work were relatively rare.

One English craftsman who did identify his products was Roger Payne of London. An eccentric and a heavy drinker, Payne was nevertheless a careful worker and a creative artist in the bindery. His books are beautifully adorned with patterns built up with small tools that he designed and cut himself. In many of the books he bound, Payne included a detailed account of his work. The following statement, copied in part from a Bible now owned by Princeton University, is a good example:

Letter'd in ye most exact manner, exceeding rich small Tool Gilt Back of a new pattern studded in Compartments. The outside finished in the Richest & most elegant Taste Richer, & more exact than any Book that I ever Bound. The insides finished in a new design exceeding elegant. Bound in the very best manner sew'd with silk on strong and neat Bands. The Back lined with Russia Leather under the Blue morrocco. Cover very strong & neat Boards....

_TELLTALE TOOLS_

Although some colonial binders labeled their products, none of the several Williamsburg bookbinders of colonial days followed Roger Payne's admirable precedent. Examples of the work of some of them, however, have been identified beyond doubt through direct or circumstantial evidence--the latter often derived by processes resembling police detection.

Clues to the identity of a binder may be found in various facets of printing and binding: shop records of orders filled, materials used, and wages paid; place and date of publication as given on title pages; watermarks in the paper; and recurrent decorative patterns. Even contemporary newspaper advertisements may throw light on the matter.

Evidence of every kind has been used in tracing out the story of the bookbinding craft in Williamsburg. The surest clues, especially in tracking down and identifying individual bindings, have been the distinctive footprints left by the binders' decorating tools. Archaeological excavations on the site of the Printing Office have yielded examples of these tools, some for stamping letters and others for impressing the gilded decoration that made the eighteenth-century bookbinder's products as attractive as they were useful.

Under the eye of microscope and enlarging camera even mass-produced typewriters reveal slight irregularities that are unique to each machine. The brass stamps and rolls used by eighteenth-century binders for working decorations into leather were all made by hand. Because of some imperfection in workmanship or simply because ornamental dies were not supposed to duplicate each other, each tool had its own peculiarities. Very often the distinguishing characteristics of the impressions they made are visible to the naked eye.

Two such telltale tools--both "rolls" or wheel-like tools used to make continuous border patterns--proved especially useful in tracing the history of Williamsburg bookbinders and bindings. The trail of one can be followed through the ownership of successive binders for nearly three-quarters of a century. Another shows up again and again throughout a fifty-year period. Similar clues left by other tools were also helpful in the detective process, but cannot be dealt with in this brief account.

For convenience we shall call the two chief telltales the "Mousetrap" roll and the "egg" roll. They serve almost as indexes to the rest of our story. The impressions made by the original tools, and the "smoke imprint" made by modern recuttings of the same tools, are shown in the accompanying illustration.

The Mousetrap roll owes its name to the publication on which it made its first known appearance, a Latin poem entitled _Muscipula_, which means "mousetrap." Its pattern, alternating two rather conventional motifs, is not particularly noteworthy in appearance. Nevertheless, the impression it made was not duplicated by any other roll.

The egg roll is no more unusual as a pattern, but gains distinction from the fact that its built-in signature is an obvious mistake. It also alternates two conventional motifs, a Maltese cross and a pointed oval or "egg." Perhaps by looking at the detail of the illustration you can see why this tool identifies itself every time it appears on a binding. Apparently the engraver who made the original roll erred in calculating its circumference and came out uneven with his pattern. So he simply made the final oval longer than the others.

Once seen, the flaw jumps to the eye from every binding on which it appears and might seem to offer clear proof that all such bindings done within the same period were the work of one man. But even the best circumstantial evidence falls short of perfection. Although we can say, for instance, that such-and-such bindings came from the shop of William Parks, we cannot always say that he himself did the work.

At one time Parks appears to have employed as many as eight or nine helpers in his printing office and nearby paper mill. Very probably one or more of them was specifically hired to handle the binding end of the business, just as William Hunter later employed John Stretch to do both bookbinding and bookkeeping.

However, like Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, William Bradford in New York, and James Franklin in Boston, Parks was doubtless quite capable of binding a book as well as printing it. Eighteenth-century craftsmen of every sort customarily doubled in related crafts: the silversmith was likely to be a jeweler, too, and the cabinetmaker also a house-joiner. Printing and binding have always been complementary processes, and nearly every colonial printer could, if necessary, bind the product of his press.

_EARLY IMPRESSIONS_

A great many colonial printers also published weekly newspapers, in whose columns they advertised the job-printing services and stationery wares they had to offer. The colophon of the _Virginia Gazette_ of October 1, 1736, for instance, specified that it was printed in Williamsburg "by W. PARKS. By whom Subscriptions are taken for this Paper, at 15 _s. per Annum_: and BOOK-BINDING is done reasonably, in the best Manner."

The first successful printer in Virginia, Parks had been public printer to the colony of Maryland before he moved to Williamsburg in 1730. One of the early publications issued by his Annapolis shop, in 1728, was the aforementioned book of Latin verse, and the three surviving copies are all decorated in the same Cambridge pattern and all with the roll we have named the Mousetrap roll.

_The Complete Mariner_, a manuscript volume of navigational exercises with a title page printed in Williamsburg in 1731, was doubtless one of the first products of Parks's shop in Williamsburg. Its cover was handsomely decorated in blind with the Mousetrap roll and with two other ornaments that also were used on books issued by Parks's Annapolis shop and later on bindings done in Williamsburg.

In 1736 Parks published the _Charter and Statutes of the_ _College of William and Mary, in Virginia_. Three copies survive in their original bindings. Two of these--one in England, one in America--bear the marks of both the Mousetrap roll and the egg roll in the simple pattern illustrated on page 11. The third is more elaborately decorated, with many small impressions of other tools, but around the edge is the telltale egg roll.

Many of the same tools used on this third copy of the William and Mary Charter, including the egg roll around the border, reappear on one copy of a book printed nearly a decade later in New York. This was Daniel Horsmanden's account of a Negro conspiracy to burn New York City. The copy in question, now in the Library of Congress, bears the brief title _New York Conspiracy_ on its spine. The magnificent library of William Byrd III at Westover plantation included a book listed under the same abbreviated title. Daniel Horsmanden was a cousin of Byrd's. Could the Library of Congress volume have been bound for Byrd at the Williamsburg shop of William Parks? The similarities in tooling--including use of the unmistakeable egg roll--would seem to prove it.

Another link in the chain of clues appears on the cover of a manuscript volume probably written and bound at about the same time. This was a catalogue of Byrd's library made by John Stretch, presumably bound by him, and decorated with the egg roll and one other tool known from earlier Williamsburg bindings.

Stretch may have worked for Parks before the latter's death in 1750. He was in the employ of Parks's successor, William Hunter, for a number of years. Presumably he bound the books that issued from Hunter's press during this period as well as the blank record books that were a staple item of Hunter's business. One of these blank books was used by George Washington for copies of his letters and invoices from 1755 to 1765--and it, too, was decorated with the egg roll.

One of the few printed books known to have come from Hunter's shop was a new edition of the William and Mary Charter, printed in 1758. One copy that survives in original covers has another roll also used on the Washington letter book and small ornaments used on both the earlier edition of the Charter and on the _New York Conspiracy_, plus design similarities to both of these and to the Stretch catalogue of Byrd's library.

A daybook kept by William Hunter during the first two years of his proprietorship of the shop carries the trail a bit farther. A daybook was simply a running record of each day's transactions of all kinds, more often called a "journal" nowadays. It would certainly have been bound right in the shop, and this daybook bears the impress of a stamp previously identified with Parks's Annapolis and earliest Williamsburg imprints.