Some idea of the volume of binding done in Hunter’s establishment during the two years covered by his daybook may be gathered from the partial figures for supplies charged to binding. These included £56 17s. 6d. for paper and £250 13s. 9½d. for other binding materials, chiefly calf and sheepskins, gold leaf, and pasteboard. In physical quantity the totals are again incomplete but indicative: at least 140 dozen skins and more than a ton of pasteboard.

These materials, of course, went to the binding of printed as well as blank books. As their daybooks show, the binding of books to order was a steady source of income for both Hunter and Royle—and doubtless for Royle’s successors as it had been for Hunter’s predecessor. Custom work included the rebinding of worn books, the lettering and application of title panels, and perhaps some binding of books the printer bought in flat sheets, already printed, from London or from another colonial printer.

The fact that custom binding and rebinding accounted for a prominent share of the work done by Williamsburg binders indicates that Governor Botetourt was not the only man in Virginia before the Revolution who owned and cherished books. According to one estimate, there were at least 1,000 private libraries with at least 20,000 volumes altogether before the colony was one hundred years old. Another study of 100 such collections, including the largest, calculated their average size at 106 titles (possibly twice that many volumes).

The average is high because the study included such very extensive libraries as those of William Byrd II, Robert Carter, and Ralph Wormeley. Nearly half of the libraries in the group studied had fewer than twenty-five titles. However, most Virginia gentlemen of the planter aristocracy owned at least an armful of books.

An occasional book in any such collection might have been written by the owner himself. Hunter stitched a manuscript volume for Nathaniel Walthoe, Esqr., and Royle bound a handwritten book for John Blair. What these gentlemen had written that deserved such care can only be guessed at. Both were officials, so the books might well have been public records of some kind. On the other hand, perhaps the content was less prosaic: poetry, maybe, or something like the “list of Horse Matches” that Royle bound for the Hon. John Tayloe at two shillings.

Music books, volumes of collected pamphlets and magazines, a “cyphering book” for Mrs. Jane Vobe, keeper of the King’s Arms Tavern, and dozens of similar items in the Hunter and Royle daybooks account for only a portion of custom binding, however. The book most often bound to order was the Bible, closely followed by the Anglican prayer book. Hunter bound a number of Bibles for 6 shillings, but charged 12 shillings for a “large Church Bible” and 50 shillings for one “neatly bound in Turkey.” “Turkey,” “levant,” and “morocco” leathers were all goatskin, each taking its name from the region where it was tanned.

Here are a few entries from Royle’s daybook during mid-1765, selected not only because they show the binder’s price list, but also because the customer’s name or occupation, or his preferences in reading matter and binding, or his concern for the intellectual advancement of the fair sex may be of interest: