Getting the Word Out: Printing Office and Bindery

Dateline: Williamsburg 1750. Let’s say you want your fellow Virginians to benefit from your list of native plants and how to care for them. Or the House of Burgesses wants to disseminate a new law they’ve enacted. Or you’re Benjamin Franklin and you’ve written down your scientific experiments on lightning rods for posterity. Telling neighbors in the tavern or barbershop is okay, but you want wider distribution. What do you do?

You go to the printing office and bindery. This shop also served as post office and printing press for a succession of newspapers called Virginia Gazette. On the day we visited, postal and printing operations were closed, so we didn’t get to see any type being set or broadsheets being rolled out, but we learned a lot about colonial communications in the bindery.

The bindery shop interpreter showed us how books and pamphlets were put together. Glue was a mixture of flour and water. Carmine dye was made from cochineal insects. Printed papers sat under weights until ready to be sewn together with linen thread. Some books were bound with cardboard covers, sometimes decorated by running a brass comb through carmine dye to create a moiré pattern. This was called marbling, and a person had to apprentice seven to eight years to become a marbler. Some endpapers of books were marbled. Other books were bound with leather, tooled, and stamped with various designs.

In this photo, you can see stacks of paper toward the left. On the far right is an apparatus used for stitching the binding. Over the fireplace are leatherworking tools to roll different designs into leather binding.