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.

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.