[Illustration: _The watermark of paper made in William Park’s paper mill near Williamsburg. It represents the coat of arms of the Virginia colony. This tracing is taken from Rutherford Goodwin, _The William Parks Paper Mill at Williamsburg_ (Lexington, Va., 1939), in which he tells how the watermark was once described by a New Englander as resembling two men in long underwear with a basket of fish between them. The parallel vertical lines are the “chain lines” characteristic of handmade “laid” paper._] Evidence of every kind has been used in tracing out the story of the bookbinding craft in Williamsburg. The surest clues, especially in tracking down and identifying individual bindings, have been the distinctive footprints left by the binders’ decorating tools. Archaeological excavations on the site of the Printing Office have yielded examples of these tools, some for stamping letters and others for impressing the gilded decoration that made the eighteenth-century bookbinder’s products as attractive as they were useful. Under the eye of microscope and enlarging camera even mass-produced typewriters reveal slight irregularities that are unique to each machine. The brass stamps and rolls used by eighteenth-century binders for working decorations into leather were all made by hand. Because of some imperfection in workmanship or simply because ornamental dies were not supposed to duplicate each other, each tool had its own peculiarities. Very often the distinguishing characteristics of the impressions they made are visible to the naked eye. Two such telltale tools—both “rolls” or wheel-like tools used to make continuous border patterns—proved especially useful in tracing the history of Williamsburg bookbinders and bindings. The trail of one can be followed through the ownership of successive binders for nearly three-quarters of a century. Another shows up again and again throughout a fifty-year period. Similar clues left by other tools were also helpful in the detective process, but cannot be dealt with in this brief account. For convenience we shall call the two chief telltales the “Mousetrap” roll and the “egg” roll. They serve almost as indexes to the rest of our story. The impressions made by the original tools, and the “smoke imprint” made by modern recuttings of the same tools, are shown in the accompanying illustration. The Mousetrap roll owes its name to the publication on which it made its first known appearance, a Latin poem entitled _Muscipula_, which means “mousetrap.” Its pattern, alternating two rather conventional motifs, is not particularly noteworthy in appearance. Nevertheless, the impression it made was not duplicated by any other roll.