At the time of Bolling's death he was preparing to send to press a book on grape-growing entitled _A Sketch of Vine Culture_. The book was never printed but the manuscript was copied several times and parts of it were printed contemporaneously in the _Virginia Gazette_, and subsequently in the _Bolling Memoirs_ and in the _American Farmer_.[20] Bolling's book was largely a compilation from European sources but it contained the experiences and observations of the author in cultivating European grapes in America and though not printed, was sufficiently distributed through manuscript copies and through the papers and books mentioned above, to give its author the honor of being the first American writer on grapes. In an essay on the cultivation of the vine published in the first volume of the _Transactions of the American Philosophical Society_[21] printed in Philadelphia in 1771, a Mr. Edward Antill of Shrewsbury, New Jersey, gives explicit directions for grape-growing and wine-making.[22] Antill describes only foreign varieties and leads the reader to infer, though he does not say so, that he has grown many varieties of these grapes successfully. But neither his essay, nor his efforts at grape-growing, seemed to have stimulated a grape industry worthy of note. This essay of Antill's is the second American treatise on the cultivation of the grape and was for many years the chief authority on grape-growing in America. It is greatly to be regretted that a treatise which was to be quoted for fifty years could not have been more meritorious. The eighty quarto pages written by Antill give little real or trustworthy information. It is a rambling discussion of European grapes, wine-making, the temperance question, patriotism, "wellfare of country," and "good of mankind". He quotes Columella, gives methods of curing grapes for raisins, and winds up with a discussion of figs. Yet a hundred years ago it was the chief work on grape-growing.