The Bookbinder in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: An Account of His Life & Times, & of His CraftFord, Thomas K.
History
The Bookbinder in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: An Account of His Life & Times, & of His Craft
Ford, Thomas K.
Bookbinding -- Virginia -- Williamsburg
Alexander Purdie and John Dixon, who placed the first of these
advertisements, were the successors of Joseph Royle in the shop on Duke
of Gloucester Street in Williamsburg that had passed down from William
Parks to William Hunter to Royle to Purdie. Their _Virginia Gazette_ was
the direct continuation of the paper founded by Parks in 1736. We are
not too surprised, therefore, to find the egg roll reappearing once more
on the covers of several copies of a book printed by Purdie and Dixon in
1774.
The name of Thomas Brend brings to a conclusion the known list of
bookbinders who worked in Williamsburg before the Revolution. Brend
emigrated from England to Annapolis in 1764 and set up in trade there.
It seems probable that he moved to Williamsburg with William Rind in
1766 or arrived shortly afterward. Rind was the Annapolis printer whom
Jefferson and some other patriots had induced to come to Virginia. They
hoped Rind’s press would offset the impact of Joseph Royle’s, which they
thought was too much in the governor’s pocket.
Jefferson was among the men for whom Brend bound books, as were St.
George Tucker of Williamsburg and other persons less known to history.
This work, however, he did in Richmond, where he moved after the capital
of Virginia had been changed to that city in 1780. There he did most of
his work, including the covers of many books of public records, as an
independent binder.
On an account book of the state auditor for 1785 appears the familiar
egg roll. How it got into Brend’s possession no one can say, since he
was presumably not in the direct line of succession from Parks through
Hunter and Royle. Somehow he did acquire tools from the succession, for
the trail of detection comes full circle in 1799. In that year in
Richmond Thomas Brend rebound Jefferson’s collection of the laws of
Virginia, using to decorate the board edges the same Mousetrap roll that
William Parks had used in Annapolis in 1728.
_THE BINDING OF A BOOK_
Although this small pamphlet does not pretend to be a thorough manual on
how to bind your own books, anyone seeking a hobby might well consider
bookbinding. The procedures are simple, the necessary tools and
materials need not cost a great deal, and the satisfactions one can take
in the production of his own fine bindings should be obvious.
What we can do here is to describe only the basic tools, equipment, and
procedures that would have been used by a Williamsburg craftsman in
binding a book in the most usual dress of colonial times. The practicing
binder, of course, would have had a comparative wealth of tools and
materials with which to turn out—by the time-honored and still-used
procedures—bindings in greater number and variety of finish. The
following lists represent the minimum essentials for binding a book.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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