A press that William Nuthead started at Jamestown in 1682 was quickly suppressed, and nothing of its output has survived. It was William Parks who established at Williamsburg in 1730 Virginia's first permanent press. Here Parks issued the earliest Virginia imprint now represented in the Library of Congress: A Collection of All the Acts of Assembly Now in Force, in the Colony of Virginia (1733). Printing of this book may have begun as early as 1730. In a monograph on William Parks, Lawrence C. Wroth cites evidence "in the form of a passage from Markland's Typographia, which indicates that its printing was one of the first things undertaken after Parks had set up his Williamsburg press."[2]

Two Library of Congress copies of this imposing folio—one of them seriously defective—are housed in the Law Library; while yet another copy, which is especially prized, is kept with the Jefferson Collection in the Rare Book Division since it belonged to the library which Thomas Jefferson sold to the Congress in 1815.[3] The 1815 bookplate of the Library of Congress is preserved in this rebound copy, and Jefferson's secret mark of ownership can be seen—his addition of his other initial to printed signatures I and T. A previous owner wrote "Robert [?] Lewis law Book" on a flyleaf at the end, following later acts bound into the volume and extending through the year 1742. He may well have been the same Robert Lewis (1702-65) who served in the House of Burgesses from 1744 to 1746.[4]

The Library possesses the only known copy of another early Virginia imprint bearing the same date: Charles Leslie's A Short and Easy Method with the Deists. The Fifth Edition.... Printed and sold by William Parks, at his Printing-Offices, in Williamsburg and Annapolis, 1733. Inasmuch as an advertisement for this publication in the Maryland Gazette for May 17-24, 1734, is headed "Lately Publish'd," it was most likely printed early in 1734 but dated old style, and so it probably followed the publication of the Acts of Assembly. The Library purchased the unique copy for $8 at the second Brinley sale, held in March 1880.