This collection of manuscripts and printed records documents the work and life of William Hook, cabinetmaker in Salem, Massachusetts. The William Hook Papers are divided into two series.

Series I. Business Papers consists largely of invoices, receipts, inventories, and other financial documents, with some correspondence, that substantiate furniture produced and sold by Hook for over forty years, and connect him to the various craftsmen who participated in the piecework system active in Salem in the first half of the nineteenth century. More than eighty invoices from carvers, turners, upholsterers, painters, varnishers, and gilders document the laborers involved, while over one hundred additional receipts exist from the vendors who supplied the word, hardware, fabrics, glass, and marble from which Hook's furniture was created. A set of over thirty inventories, shipping documents, and sales records describe furniture items and reveal the extent to which Hook's work was moved through agents in Boston, the American South and West, the Caribbean, and Central and South America.

Series II. Family Papers consists of documents (invoices, receipts, correspondence, and personal papers) that give insight into Hook's home life, including bills for the family's clothing, food, taxes, household goods, and pew rent, Hook's social memberships, and the schooling of his sons George and William, daughter Eliza, and two apprentices. While it has been known that Salem cabinetmakers worked cooperatively to purchase material and shared services to produce the fine furniture for which the city was known, this material defines the place that William Hook occupied in the system, and provides the names, activities and dates of craftsmen, vendors, agents, and patrons, that helped him achieve his success.