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.

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.

Hunter’s daybook shows entries covering sales of all the principal varieties and many of the subsidiary forms. In fact, entries pertaining to “blank books,” “legers,” “alphabets,” “journals,” “account books,” “day books,” “waste-books,” and the like far outnumber all other binding entries together. Royle’s daybook, which seems to have been kept on a somewhat different basis—perhaps less meticulously—than Hunter’s, lists proportionately fewer such entries compared to those for binding printed volumes.

One might expect that business record books would have been bound sturdily, but in plain and cheap dress. Sometimes they were, but often they were just as well finished as were printed books, usually in good quality calfskin, sometimes in vellum or parchment. Ledgers in particular were large and heavy books; since they got steady usage, they needed to be made of the best materials and workmanship for the sake of durability. And custom usually led to a certain amount of decoration on even the most utilitarian volume. The result was that blank books were often as fine in outward appearance as those from the press—and sometimes more costly, because of the larger skins needed to cover them.

Not a few of the books sold by William Hunter and presumed to have been made up by him or John Stretch brought a price of a pound or more. This was, as we have seen, a good deal more than Stretch earned in a week. The most imposing price charged to any of Hunter’s customers was the 3 pounds 10 shillings John Hall paid for “a large Record Book Imperial.”

All eighteenth-century paper was manufactured by hand, and sheets of various sizes and kinds bore such designations as pot, foolscap, pro patria, crown, demy, royal, super royal, imperial, atlas, and elephant. These names referred to supposedly standard sizes, but actual dimensions were neither precise nor unchanging. In seventeenth-century England a sheet of “demy” measured about 10 by 15½ inches. The English paper of the same name today is 17½ by 22½ inches.

This increase in dimensions of paper took place gradually, and as the size of sheets grew the size of pages could also grow. A result was that folio books became too large to be handy while quarto and octavo formats, which were more economical to print, gained popularity among both printers and book buyers.