In The Book of Trades 1806, the preferred wood was American oak seasoned (dried) for up to two years, cut into thin strips called staves and either kept straight or bent depending on its later purpose. For buckets, where the circumference of the bottom is smaller than the top, staves are wider at the top. The hoops, hence the surname Hooper, held the staves together around the outside circumference and were made of hazel and ash harvested from coppices or metal depending on the subsequent use of the barrel. A strip of reed (flag) placed between each stave swelled when wet to produce a watertight barrel. The Guinness website at www.guinness-storehouse.com/en/docs/Coopering_Process.pdf has an excellent description of coopering including photographs.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, most coopering was for the beer and whisky industries. Once metal casks were introduced by Guinness in 1946, the cooper’s trade virtually ceased although, according to Speyside Cooperage, a handful of specialists working today using traditional tools still repair 150,000 casks a year. Coopering demonstrations are occasionally held at craft fairs.
The Worshipful Company of Coopers www.coopers-hall.co.uk is thirty-sixth in the order of preference and is first mentioned in the Mayor’s Court records in 1298 where three coopers are named and shamed for misdemeanours. The Company’s collection of tools and artefacts is held at Coopers’ Hall, open only to members, and includes correspondence, casks and memorabilia of the trade. It can be viewed online at www.coopers-hall.co.uk/museum-gallery. Although the medieval hall didn’t escape the Great Fire of London, the records and plate had been removed to safety the previous day. The 1868 hall was destroyed in 1940 in the Blitz but the records, stored in a basement safe, survived and are now deposited in Guildhall Library. A list of archives for 1440–1978, including financial accounts, lists of freemen, registers of apprentice bindings and records relating to charities are on the AIM25 website www.aim25.ac.uk/cgi-bin/vcdf/detail?coll_id=14131&inst_id=118. For coopers apprenticed and working outside London your best bet is the local records office, but information is scattered and variable.
The earliest books were meticulously written manuscripts, illustrated, copied and bound by monks. So expensive and valued were they that they were chained up, as in Hereford Cathedral and Chetham’s Library, Manchester. Made of vellum, they were bound to keep pages together in the correct order and, to keep pages flat, encompassed between boards – hard covers. When William Caxton (1422–91) set up his printing press in Westminster in 1476, binding and printing became two different occupations; printers printed, while binders bound books.
Considering the symbiotic relationship between books and monks, it isn’t surprising to find fifteenth-century printers and booksellers based around London’s St Paul’s Cathedral and Paternoster Row. They constituted either small print shops in front of their houses or stalls open to the elements (healthy for books!) and, according to Thomas Symonds in 1514, were open for business from seven in the morning. It’s a logical progression that, a mere stroll away, Fleet Street became the epicentre of the newspaper industry.
By the mid-1840s, booksellers and bookbinders had moved behind the Strand, as explained by George Reynolds in his Mysteries of London 1844–46.
Holywell Street was once noted only as a mart for secondhand clothing, and booksellers’ shops dealing in indecent prints and volumes. The reputation it thus acquired was not a very creditable one…
Several highly respectable booksellers and publishers have [now] located themselves in the place that once deserved no better denomination than Rag Fair. The reputation of Holywell Street has now ceased to be a by-word: it is respectable; and, as a mart for the sale of literary wares, threatens to rival Paternoster Row.
A law preventing sedition and blasphemy was passed in 1549, ensuring all books were examined before sale. Throughout history, printing has been deemed dangerous to the contemporary government (as today) and during periods of insurrection renegade printers were persecuted at pain of death. At such times, some presses were ‘secret’, although they made a veritable racket when in operation. Those printing political tracts were likely to be Nonconformists and it is worth checking Nonconformist sources to reveal more information.
To ensure compliance, printers were licenced, for example under the Unlawful Societies Act 1799, and an ancestor’s licence may be in the public record office together with their registered press number. No licence, no work. No work, starvation.
Maximising opportunity during the Thames frost fairs of 1814, printers took their presses onto the ice, cranking out souvenirs. A journeyman printer, compositor or pressman in 1818 could earn, according to the Book of Trades, thirty shillings to two guineas a week.
The earliest paper, cloth parchment, was made in the thirteenth century from linen rags mixed with wood and straw, beaten to a pulp using copious amounts of water, pressed, dried and hardened. England’s first rag paper mill was set up in 1588 by Queen Elizabeth I’s jeweller, Sir John Spilman (?–1626) in Dartford, Kent, using the plentiful supply of water from the River Darent. Spilman/Spielman was a German employing German immigrants in his mill until English workers developed the skills and expertise. It produced good-quality white paper rather than the ubiquitous brown which was, apart from parchment and vellum, the only alternative. By the following year he had a monopoly on the production of white paper. There were other mills; thirty-seven existed in England between 1588 and 1650, but all producing the inferior brown paper.
An impression of Spilman’s mill is given in Thomas Churchyard’s sycophantic 1588 poem:
The Hammers thump and make so loud a noise
As fuller doth that beats his woollen cloth
In open show, then Sundry secret toyes
Make rotten rags to yield a thickened froth
There it is stamped and washed as white as snow
Then flung on frame and hanged to dry, I trow
Thus paper straight it is to write upon
As it were rubbed and smoothed with slicking stone.
Hand-made paper was produced by dipping a metal fine-wire frame into the pulp, taken out and dried. Because of the wires, the paper contained lines, much like brown wrapping paper today. Over the years, the wires were spaced at different widths, which is how experts date old paper. Paper was subject to excise duty and tax from 1696 until 1861. In 1712, each paper mill was given an Excise number which, should the mill become redundant, was used again on another mill.
A machine invented in 1844 made paper from wood pulp, not rags, contributing to the nineteenth century’s voracious appetite for newspapers and books. The Education Acts worked wonders on literacy levels, shown indirectly by census records; in 1851, there were 26,024 printers and by 1871 nearly twice as many at 44,814.
Newport Pagnell’s William Cowley parchment works has been in existence since 1870 and is the only company in the UK still making commercial sheepskin parchment. Their website at www.williamcowley.co.uk explains the processes employed in this industry. Parchment and vellum are made from skins and hides and, like paper making, need a constant supply of water for cleaning hides, which is why the industry was based near rivers. In the past, this industry, like other leather/hide based industries such as tanning, which used animal excrement to prepare the leather, was accompanied by a nauseating stench. Wealthier citizens lived upwind.
Bookbinders were generally located near the printer and proliferated in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth century. The studio or workshop where book binding took place was the bindery, usually a workshop in the binder’s house. It needed sewing frames and needles for stitching pages together, guillotines or sharp knives, stamps for engraving and indentations and a press to hold the book still whilst working on it, together with leather or cloth for covers, gold leaf and twine. Itinerant bookbinders travelled the country carrying their tools in packs.
In 1868, a bookbinding sewing machine was invented by David McConnell Smyth, followed by gluing, trimming and case-making (hard cover) machines. According to Walter Newbury, who set up his bookbinding company in 1895 in Plashett Grove, East Ham, ‘the machine is but the servant of a good workman’. A perfectly bound book encompassed the essentials of solidity (so they didn’t fall apart), elasticity (easily opened) and elegance as emphasised in Newbury’s motto, ‘thoroughness’.
Like many crafts, bookbinding suffered badly over the years although the trade was boosted by the highly elaborate and influential designs of William Morris (1834–1896). Their bread and butter now consists of restoration work and binding university theses.
As a commercial trade, printing, bookbinding and the stationery business was limited by literacy levels and, until the majority of people could read, the stationer traded to a highly sophisticated and prosperous customer in affluent areas such as a city or large town.
It was common in smaller towns to find booksellers and stationers incorporated within another trade. Anne Chapman, running a pharmacy and perfumery in Newport Pagnell in 1795, had a side-line in books, although there was a full-time bookseller in town.
As well as pen and ink, notepaper, envelopes, wrapping paper, sealing wax and string, stationers sold books intended to be written in: diaries, notebooks, account books and ledgers. These shops were a repository of scholarship and pensiveness, often doubling as private libraries where, for a subscription, books were borrowed with a fine for those returned late, lost or damaged. Books were relatively expensive so it was a cheap way to access a wider selection of books. After the rise of the public library from the early twentieth century and free book borrowing, private libraries fell out of favour, but there is always a silver lining for someone. Here it was the bookbinder whose trade was boosted by rebinding books in plain covers for the libraries.
British History Online has a fascinating explanation of the industry and mentions some London practitioners. It explains that these are the minority, as few bookbinders are known by name. If you have a bookbinder working in London, they may be mentioned in www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=22177. If your ancestors were papermakers in Exeter, Devon, try http://bookhistory.blogspot.co.uk.
The British Library is attempting to compile a database of bookbinders www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings. There is a small picture gallery of bindings throughout the ages and a search box where a name brings up any books in their library for which they have bookbinder information. ‘Smith’ brought up eighty-nine results including W. Smith of Iron Bridge (circa 1817), bound in brown calf and blind tooled. C. Smith worked in Bath around 1800 and one of his books is bound in black goatskin, tooled in gold. The advanced search lists all the bookbinders in their database. Results include a thumbnail of the book cover. Some books have considerable detail but, as this project is a work in progress, some records are incomplete.
A fraternity of stationers was in existence in 1404 and the Royal Charter for the Stationers’ Company’s was bestowed in 1557 when few could read. Not all early booksellers and printers belonged to this Company; some were members of the Grocers’ and Drapers’ Companies, so check there too. Gordon Duff’s A Century of the English Book Trade, 1905, https://archive.org/details/centuryofenglish00duffuoft names names and explains the English book trade in the fifteenth and sixteen centuries.
The British Book Trade Index at the University of Birmingham is a useful and easily negotiated resource at www.bbti.bham.ac.uk. As explained on the website, the information is compiled from various primary sources such as directories, poll books, census records and British Record Society indexes, and includes variations of names and occasional duplicate information. The index catalogues anyone working in the book trade, including Stationers’ Company masters and apprentices, auctioneers, book sellers, binders, stationers, papermakers, publishers, printers, rag-makers and the like from the fifteenth century (there are not many of these). Some trades appear to have little relevance to the book trade itself, so check similar trades in your family; fellmongers (dealers in hides and tanning; the hides were used in parchment and vellum making), tanners and leather dressers for example. Type in a surname or place in the search box and click on the result to reveal information such as name, dates trading, location and the source of the information. The Scottish Book Trade Index is at www.nls.uk/catalogues/ scottish-book-trade-index and lists the trades and addresses of people involved in printing in Scotland up to 1850, including printers, publishers, booksellers, bookbinders, stationers and papermakers.
The British Association of Paper Historians (BAPH http://baph.org.uk) is useful, with images of paper-mills and the history of papermaking in the UK. www.papermakers.org.uk intends to be a genealogical base for papermakers but, at the time of writing, was a work in progress, listing some papermakers from the 1881 census from Berkshire, Hampshire and Oxfordshire.
In the days before motorcars, the horse was king. For many, no criminal was more heinous that the horse thief (calling someone this was a term of abuse) and in the Middle Ages the offence was punishable by death. A multitude of trades and crafts were associated with the horse: coaching inn, coachbuilder, saddle and harness maker, loriner, blacksmith and horse-brass maker, to mention a few. Harness makers needed straw for padding horse collars, while saddles were filled with wool, consolidating the symbiotic relationship with the countryside.