The Bookbinder in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg / An Account of His Life & Times, & of His Craft

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:

Bound book.

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.

Clyx.com