A leather bound schoolbook, held in the museum archives was bought on August 9th 1667 and owned by John Minifie. Three hundred and thirty three years later the book was carefully conserved to rescue it from the natural deterioration to old paper and the acid in ancient ink.

The first part of the book forms a course in arithmetic that was required in business and the examples given are often long and complicated. Here is a maths question to solve: “A Marchant sent his good shipe to the Newfoundland to buy fish and to carrie it from thence to the Marcellis (Marseille) in the Straights and having loadden the said shipe they found by theire accompts that they had taken aboard 3487642 kinttells of fish which cost 14 royalls a kinttell. Now it happened as they were in theire said voyage towards the Marcellis they meete with three men of war which tooke away 987652 kinttells of theire fish And then afterwards they meete with a most violent storme And then to save themselves they were faine to cast out overboard 8324 Kinttells of there fish After which they safly arrived to there intended port of discharge I demand how many kinttells they had left for there market And have a care to Answer mee right and prove it”.

Turning the book upside down and reading from the new first page. It has long sentences written by the boy's Grandfather across the top lines of 59 pages. (some pages are missing) Underneath the top line the boy has copied those sentences twenty two times as a handwriting exercise. Almost every page is signed: John Minifie 1667, the spelling is very consistent, but a notable exception is Honyton and Honiton. The whole work apart from a few pencil doodles are written with a quill pen. It is interesting for the light it throws on education, social affairs, and the history of lacemaking in the latter part of the seventeenth century

There are nine pages of accounts, written over a short space of days around Christmas 1667, for lace bought from outworkers and for pins and thread sold to them. Joan Foeles sold six yards of lace and bought pins for ten shillings. There is a record of material sent by coach to London and a sale of waistcoats.

There are some extraneous entries. Several of them are drawings, some are names and schoolboy comments. Doodles include scrolls, animals, sheep, birds, horses, people in seventeenth century wigs and costume, horsemen, muskets, swords, pikes, bows, and arrows, and men o' war.