Alexander Purdie and John Dixon, who placed the first of these advertisements, were the successors of Joseph Royle in the shop on Duke of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg that had passed down from William Parks to William Hunter to Royle to Purdie. Their Virginia Gazette was the direct continuation of the paper founded by Parks in 1736. We are not too surprised, therefore, to find the egg roll reappearing once more on the covers of several copies of a book printed by Purdie and Dixon in 1774.
The name of Thomas Brend brings to a conclusion the known list of bookbinders who worked in Williamsburg before the Revolution. Brend emigrated from England to Annapolis in 1764 and set up in trade there. It seems probable that he moved to Williamsburg with William Rind in 1766 or arrived shortly afterward. Rind was the Annapolis printer whom Jefferson and some other patriots had induced to come to Virginia. They hoped Rind’s press would offset the impact of Joseph Royle’s, which they thought was too much in the governor’s pocket.
Jefferson was among the men for whom Brend bound books, as were St. George Tucker of Williamsburg and other persons less known to history. This work, however, he did in Richmond, where he moved after the capital of Virginia had been changed to that city in 1780. There he did most of his work, including the covers of many books of public records, as an independent binder.
On an account book of the state auditor for 1785 appears the familiar egg roll. How it got into Brend’s possession no one can say, since he was presumably not in the direct line of succession from Parks through Hunter and Royle. Somehow he did acquire tools from the succession, for the trail of detection comes full circle in 1799. In that year in Richmond Thomas Brend rebound Jefferson’s collection of the laws of Virginia, using to decorate the board edges the same Mousetrap roll that William Parks had used in Annapolis in 1728.
THE BINDING OF A BOOK
Although this small pamphlet does not pretend to be a thorough manual on how to bind your own books, anyone seeking a hobby might well consider bookbinding. The procedures are simple, the necessary tools and materials need not cost a great deal, and the satisfactions one can take in the production of his own fine bindings should be obvious.
What we can do here is to describe only the basic tools, equipment, and procedures that would have been used by a Williamsburg craftsman in binding a book in the most usual dress of colonial times. The practicing binder, of course, would have had a comparative wealth of tools and materials with which to turn out—by the time-honored and still-used procedures—bindings in greater number and variety of finish. The following lists represent the minimum essentials for binding a book.
When the time comes for applying decoration to a binding, the bookbinder—here using a single-fillet roll—can exercise his artistic imagination or follow a traditional pattern.
Materials