Eighteenth-century appraisals of several printing houses indicate an average value of £100 to £125 currency. We may suppose that William Parks set up shop in Williamsburg in 1730 on some such scale as this, adding type and other equipment to the value of £359 Virginia currency or £288 sterling at the time his equipment was sold to William Hunter in 1751. Undoubtedly Parks’s three presses and his type constituted his chief equipment. The presses presumably were of the English common sort, which had then been in standard use in the British Isles for nearly one hundred years. The type was an alloy of lead, tin, and antimony, the letters having been cast in Holland or England, and probably was valued at more than the rest of Parks’s facilities together. For the rest, equipment consisted of such printers’ staples as poles for drying paper, “shooting sticks,” quoins, planes, type cases, type racks, composing sticks, lye troughs, wetting troughs, and other paraphernalia. For bookbinding the printer needed other instruments, some of which could be made in Williamsburg. The majority of the tools, however, were imported from Great Britain or Holland. [Illustration: _A paper mill. Here are shown the operations involved in making a sheet of paper in the eighteenth century. (1) The vatman dipping the deckle and screen into a vat of paper pulp. (2) The coucher removing the deckle and pressing the freshly formed sheet of paper on felt. (3) Preparing the new paper for pressing. (4) A rack for stacking wet sheets of paper prior to their being pressed. (5) Details of the paper press. (6) Details of the vat._ DIDEROT.] As he received each font or size of type, the colonial printer would distribute it in a set of four wooden trays, two for Roman type and two for italic. These contained partitions for each “character,” or “sort,” as the letters and numerals were called. Such partitions varied in size depending on the frequency of use of each letter or numeral, and they were so placed as to permit the printer to assemble type with a minimum of movement. (Because capital letters are usually arranged in the upper two cases and small letters in the lower two, printers traditionally refer to them as “upper case” or “lower case,” respectively.)