Morocco leather
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.