[Illustration: _A part of a page from William Hunter’s daybook for the Williamsburg Printing Office, especially redrawn for this booklet. Notice the entry for bookbinding wages paid to John Stretch._] 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.