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.
Another daybook of the Williamsburg printing office also survives in original binding. It dates from the time of Hunter’s successor, Joseph Royle, and almost beyond question was also bound in the shop where it was used. Its cover, not surprisingly, was tooled in blind with two of the familiar rolls, including the egg roll. A volume of York County records also survives from the period of Royle’s proprietorship. Its cover shows the impressions of three old standbys: the egg, the Mousetrap, and a third roll seen on earlier Williamsburg bindings.
THE BINDING BUSINESS
If the outside covers of two printing office daybooks can add a few bits to our story, the inside pages should be a gold mine of information about bookbinding in colonial Williamsburg. And so they are.
Hunter’s daybook for the period from July 1750 through June 1752 and Royle’s covering most of 1764 and all of 1765 tell a great deal about the quantity and variety of binding work they did, the prices they charged, and a little about the wages they paid. Hunter, for example, at the end of 1751 entered payment of 38 pounds 15 shillings against the bookbinding account “To John Stretch For his Wages from the 14th of January to this Day.” Thus, from this source, Stretch earned 15 shillings sixpence a week.
A part of a page from William Hunter’s daybook for the Williamsburg Printing Office, especially redrawn for this booklet. Notice the entry for bookbinding wages paid to John Stretch.
The kinds of bookbinding done in the shops of Hunter and Royle—and doubtless also by the other Williamsburg printers, about whose business we lack detailed information—can be divided into three main groups: edition binding, custom binding, and the manufacture of blank record books. As a sideline, they also made and sold pocketbooks, letter cases, and other kinds of pocket cases.
In volume of work done in Hunter’s shop, and probably in many other colonial binderies, the manufacture and sale of blank books was easily of first importance. Obviously these were not printed books—although the pages of some of them were ruled by hand in advance of binding. They were letter-copy books, account books, and record books of various kinds used by everyone who was at all systematic about his business affairs.
Accounts kept “after the Italian manner,” as described in John Mair’s Book Keeping Methodiz’d (about 1750), called for ten different books. The three chief ones were a “wastebook” in which transactions were jotted down at the time they took place, a permanent “journal” or “daybook” into which they were transcribed in a more stately hand when time permitted, and a “ledger” containing in final and complete form all accounts pertaining to the business. Subsidiary records described by Mair were the cash book, book of charges and merchandise, book of house expenses, factory or invoice book, sales book, bill book, and receipt book.