[Illustration: _This representation of a book cover shows one of the chief clues followed in tracing the tools used and books bound by Williamsburg binders. It shows the design on a copy of the _Statutes and Charter of the College of William and Mary_ printed in Williamsburg in 1736 by William Parks and bound in his shop. The College itself is in Williamsburg, of course, but this volume is in the John Carter Brown Library at Providence, Rhode Island, and another like it in design is in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, England. The illustration was made (except for the magnification) as a smoke imprint of twentieth-century tools cut in the same pattern as the originals. The inner panel of the Cambridge style decoration was made by the “Mousetrap” roll that Parks brought with him from Annapolis. The intermediate rectangle, made by the “egg” roll, reveals the elongated oval that reappeared on other books connected with Parks and his successors in the Williamsburg printing offices. The corner fleuron also appeared on earlier Parks bindings._] The egg roll is no more unusual as a pattern, but gains distinction from the fact that its built-in signature is an obvious mistake. It also alternates two conventional motifs, a Maltese cross and a pointed oval or “egg.” Perhaps by looking at the detail of the illustration you can see why this tool identifies itself every time it appears on a binding. Apparently the engraver who made the original roll erred in calculating its circumference and came out uneven with his pattern. So he simply made the final oval longer than the others. Once seen, the flaw jumps to the eye from every binding on which it appears and might seem to offer clear proof that all such bindings done within the same period were the work of one man. But even the best circumstantial evidence falls short of perfection. Although we can say, for instance, that such-and-such bindings came from the shop of William Parks, we cannot always say that he himself did the work. At one time Parks appears to have employed as many as eight or nine helpers in his printing office and nearby paper mill. Very probably one or more of them was specifically hired to handle the binding end of the business, just as William Hunter later employed John Stretch to do both bookbinding and bookkeeping. However, like Benjamin Franklin in Philadelphia, William Bradford in New York, and James Franklin in Boston, Parks was doubtless quite capable of binding a book as well as printing it. Eighteenth-century craftsmen of every sort customarily doubled in related crafts: the silversmith was likely to be a jeweler, too, and the cabinetmaker also a house-joiner. Printing and binding have always been complementary processes, and nearly every colonial printer could, if necessary, bind the product of his press. _EARLY IMPRESSIONS_