John Ratcliff (bookbinder)

Biography and career

Ratcliff, an experienced London bookbinder, was sent from England sometime between 1661 and 1663 for the purpose of binding copies of Eliot's Indian Bible. He moved to America with his wife and family, and lived and worked in Boston for about 20 years. Sometime around 1682, he left America and went back to England. According to historian Thomas James Holmes, Ratcliff may have returned to England because he was facing competition from younger bookbinders such as Edmund Ranger, who displayed superior workmanship.

At the beginning of Ratcliff's career, he did plain bookbinding using leather from domestic sheep and calves. He decorated the covers with fashions of blind tooling typical of the time period. Later Englishman Ratcliff departed from the normal bookbinding practices and used higher quality and more sophisticated methods, including pasteboard covers instead of wooden boards, and imported Morocco leather instead of domestic leather. He also used marbled end papers instead of plain end papers and did gold tooling instead of blind tooling. The work of typical American colonial bookbinders was crude when compared to Ratcliff's.

Ratcliff spent most of his working career doing bookbinding. However, he also sold a few publications. One publication, printed for Ratcliff in Boston in 1682, was "Fast Sermon at Weathersfield." This 1678 sermon was written by Joseph Rowlandson of Lancaster, Massachusetts. Another publication, also printed in Boston in 1682 was, "A Poem dedicated to the Memory of the Reverend and Excellent Mr. Urian Oakes, the late Pastor to Christ's Flock, and President of Harvard Colledge in Cambridge" who died in 1681 at age fifty. Cotton Mather wrote the poem when he was nineteen years old as his first published work.

Indian Bible

Ratcliff of Boston, Massachusetts bound 200 of the 1500 copies of Eliot's Indian Bible in 1663 for influential noblemen and higher ranking church dignitaries. The bindings were made from sheep-skin. Historical records note that in 1664, Ratcliff complained in a petition to the Commissioners of the United Colonies that he was paid too little for binding Eliot's Indian Bible. Ratcliff was being paid two shillings and six pence per copy by Hezekiah Usher and had to supply the covers, clasps, glue, and thread himself. He said that he had to pay 18 shillings for book binding accessories (i.e. thread, glue, pasteboard, clasps) that cost only four shillings in England. Each Bible copy took a day's labour to bind. He told the Commissioners that the lowest price he could bind Eliot's Indian Bible for was three shillings four pence a book, because of the high price he had to pay for the English book binding accessories. In comparison, Samuel Gellibrand, a London bookbinder, was paid ten shillings a copy for binding 20 copies of the Indian Bible that was sent to him in England for binding. This was about four times what Ratcliff was being paid to do the same work.

The Eliot Indian Bible Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe Up-Biblum God. The printers were Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson of Cambridge, Massachusetts. This copy bound by Ratcliff in 1663 is held at The Rosenbach Museum & Library

The Book of the General Laws and Liberties Concerning the Inhabitants of the Massachusetts

The General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusetts Colony Revised and Reprinted by Order of the General Court were bound around 1676. It was printed in 1672 by Samuel Green for the bookseller Hezekiah Usher of Boston, Massachusetts. The book is a folio 6 inches by 10 inches. The binding was made from calfskin. The color is a deep tone mellow brown, comparable to mahogany. The cover has lines and tools in blank, developing a darker brown than the cover.

The edges of the front cover board covered in calfskin consist of two lines. Within these two line borders there is a marked out panel of two lines. On the corners of this panel is a flourish of tooling. This tooling is a center flower with a fan-shaped tool within the corner. A small flower cluster goes outwards from the edge corners of the cover towards the center. At the upper and lower ends of the main cover halfway between the outer corners is an impression of a triangle of three buds. In the dead center of the cover is an impression of the small flower cluster as used on the outer edge corners. There is a "J" gold initial on the left side of this center image and a "S" gold initial on the right side of the center image, perhaps for the name John Sherman. Sherman was the representative to the General Court of the Massachusetts Colony in 1651, 1653, 1663 and 1680.

The folds of the sections were normally sewn together per the custom of the time. This book did not follow this custom however. The body of the book was cut with four small eye holes through the sides along its back margins. Through these holes were threaded four rawhide strings to hold the book together tightly with the cover boards which also had the four eye holes. The cover boards were even with the edges of the paper in the book.

The American Antiquarian Society has in their possession a book copy of these Massachusetts laws bound by Ratcliff. It is speculated that the reason the leather covers have held up well for over 300 years is that the leather was treated with sumach as a tanning agent, even though the calfskin has become hard as old vellum. The front of the book covers were originally furnished with two clasps for closing the book. The upper clasp for closing the book is missing on the Antiquarian copy. The lower one is still there and it has a simple design on it.

Other bindings by Ratcliff

Other book bindings credited to Ratcliff as his work are:

"A Collection of Tracts"
Increase Mather 1670–80