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. [Illustration: _This engraving from the French eighteenth-century encyclopedia of Denis Diderot shows the interior of a bookbindery of the time, and some of the equipment used. The operations under way in the shop are (a) “smashing” folded signatures flat on a stone anvil; (b) sewing signatures together on the stitching frame; (c) trimming the edges of a book before the covers are put on; and (d) squeezing a stack of finished books in a standing press._] _BINDING TO THE CUSTOMER’S ORDER_ Some idea of the volume of binding done in Hunter’s establishment during the two years covered by his daybook may be gathered from the partial figures for supplies charged to binding. These included £56 17s. 6d. for paper and £250 13s. 9½d. for other binding materials, chiefly calf and sheepskins, gold leaf, and pasteboard. In physical quantity the totals are again incomplete but indicative: at least 140 dozen skins and more than a ton of pasteboard. These materials, of course, went to the binding of printed as well as blank books. As their daybooks show, the binding of books to order was a steady source of income for both Hunter and Royle—and doubtless for Royle’s successors as it had been for Hunter’s predecessor. Custom work included the rebinding of worn books, the lettering and application of title panels, and perhaps some binding of books the printer bought in flat sheets, already printed, from London or from another colonial printer.