  Although some colonial binders labeled their products, none of the several Williamsburg bookbinders of colonial days followed Roger Payne’s admirable precedent. Examples of the work of some of them, however, have been identified beyond doubt through direct or circumstantial Clues to the identity of a binder may be found in various facets of printing and binding: shop records of orders filled, materials used, and wages paid; place and date of publication as given on title pages; watermarks in the paper; and recurrent decorative patterns. Even contemporary newspaper advertisements may throw light on the matter. The watermark of paper made in William Park’s paper mill near Williamsburg. It represents the coat of arms of the Virginia colony. This tracing is taken from Rutherford Goodwin, The William Parks Paper Mill at Williamsburg (Lexington, Va., 1939), in which he tells how the watermark was once described by a New Englander as resembling two men in long underwear with a basket of fish between them. The parallel vertical lines are the “chain lines” characteristic of handmade “laid” paper. Evidence of every kind has been used in tracing out the story of the bookbinding craft in Williamsburg. The surest clues, especially in tracking down and identifying individual bindings, have been the distinctive footprints left by the binders’ decorating tools. Archaeological excavations on the site of the Printing Office have yielded examples of these tools, some for stamping letters and Under the eye of microscope and enlarging camera even mass-produced typewriters reveal slight irregularities that are unique to each machine. The brass stamps and rolls used by eighteenth-century binders for working decorations into leather were all made by hand. Because of some imperfection in workmanship or simply because ornamental dies were not supposed to duplicate each other, each tool had its own peculiarities. Very often the distinguishing characteristics of the impressions they made are visible to the naked eye. Two such telltale tools—both “rolls” or wheel-like tools used to make continuous border patterns—proved especially useful in tracing the history of Williamsburg bookbinders and bindings. The trail of one can be followed through the ownership of successive binders for nearly three-quarters of a century. Another shows up again and again throughout a fifty-year period. Similar clues left by other tools were also helpful in the detective process, but cannot be dealt with in this brief account. For convenience we shall call the two chief telltales the “Mousetrap” roll and the “egg” roll. They serve almost as indexes to the rest of our story. The impressions made by the original tools, and the “smoke imprint” made by modern recuttings of the same tools, are shown in the accompanying illustration. The Mousetrap roll owes its name to the publication on which it made its first known appearance, a Latin poem entitled Muscipula, which means “mousetrap.” Its pattern, alternating two rather conventional motifs, is not particularly noteworthy in appearance. Nevertheless, the impression it made was not duplicated by any other roll. This representation of a book cover shows one of the chief clues followed in tracing the tools used and books bound by Williamsburg binders. It shows the design on a copy of the Statutes and Charter of the College of William and Mary printed in Williamsburg in 1736 by William Parks and bound in his shop. The College itself is in Williamsburg, of course, but this volume is in the John Carter Brown Library at Providence, Rhode Island, and another like it in design is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England. The illustration was made (except for the magnification) as a smoke imprint of twentieth-century tools cut in the same pattern as the originals. The inner panel of the Cambridge style decoration was made by the “Mousetrap” roll that Parks brought with him from Annapolis. The intermediate rectangle, made by the “egg” roll, reveals the elongated oval that reappeared on other books connected with Parks and his successors in the Williamsburg printing offices. The corner fleuron also appeared on earlier Parks bindings. The egg roll is no more unusual as a pattern, but gains distinction from the fact that its built-in signature is an obvious mistake. It also alternates two conventional motifs, a Maltese cross and a pointed oval or “egg.” Perhaps by looking at the detail of the illustration you can see why this tool identifies itself every time it appears on a binding. Apparently the engraver who made the original roll erred in calculating its circumference and came out uneven with his pattern. So he simply made the final oval longer than the others. Once seen, the flaw jumps to the eye from every binding on which it appears and might seem to offer clear proof that all such bindings done within the same period were the work of one man. But even the best circumstantial evidence falls short of perfection. Although we can say, for instance, that such-and-such bindings came from the shop of William Parks, we cannot always say that he himself did the work. At one time Parks appears to have employed as many as eight or nine helpers in his printing office and nearby paper mill. Very probably one or more of them was specifically hired to handle the binding end of the business, just as William Hunter later employed John Stretch to do both bookbinding and bookkeeping. However, like Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, William Bradford in New York, and James Franklin in Boston, Parks was doubtless quite capable of binding a book as well as printing it. Eighteenth-century craftsmen of every sort customarily doubled in related crafts: the silversmith was likely to be a jeweler, too, and the cabinetmaker also a house-joiner. Printing and binding have always been complementary processes, and nearly every colonial printer could, if necessary, bind the product of his press. |
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