Early Printed Books

by E. Gordon Duff

These were followed by the Polycronicon, the Chronicles of England (edit. 2), Burgh’s Cato, and the second edition of the Game of the Chesse, which is illustrated with woodcuts, the first edition having none. There are altogether sixteen different woodcuts used in the volume, and eight occur twice.

Between 1483 and the end of 1485, Caxton was at his very busiest, issuing in that time about twenty-two books; and amongst them are some of the most important. There are the Pilgrimage of the Soul, the Festial and Quattuor Sermones, the Sex Epistolæ, of which the unique copy is now in the British Museum; the Lyfe of Our Lady, the second edition of the Canterbury Tales (the first with woodcuts), Chaucer’s Troilus and Cresida and Hous of Fame, the Confessio Amantis, the Knight of the Tower, and Æsop’s Fables. This book, which appeared 26th March 1484, has a full page frontispiece and no less than 185 woodcuts, the work of two, if not three, different cutters. They are of the very poorest execution, and not original in design, being more or less carefully copied from a foreign edition. The whole of the earlier part of 1485 must have been expended upon the production of the Golden Legend, the largest book which issued from Caxton’s press. It contains 449 leaves, and is printed on a much larger sheet than was generally used by Caxton for folios, the full sheet measuring as much as 24 inches by 16 inches. It has, as illustrations, a large cut for the frontispiece, representing heaven, and two series of eighteen large and fifty-two small cuts, the large series including one of the device of the Earl of Arundel, to whom the book is dedicated. Most copies of the Golden Legend now in existence are made up partly of this and partly of the second edition. As far as can be judged, the distinguishing mark is the type of the headlines, which in the first edition are in type 3, and in the second edition in type 5. No copy is known made up entirely of one edition.

For the latter part of 1485 we have three dated books, the Morte d’Arthur (31st July), the only perfect copy of which is now, unfortunately, in America; the Life of Charles the Great (1st December), the only existing copy of which is in the British Museum; and The Knight Paris and the Fair Vienne (19th December), of which again the only known copy is in the British Museum.

In 1487, Caxton tried a new venture, and had printed for him at Paris, by George Maynyal, an edition of the Sarum Missal. Only one copy is known, slightly imperfect, which is in private hands. In this book, for the first time, Caxton used his well-known device, probably for the purpose of emphasising what might easily have been overlooked,—that the book was printed at his expense. So much has been written on Caxton’s device, and such extraordinary theories made about its hidden meanings, that it may be as well to point out that it consists simply of his mark standing between his initials, with a certain amount of unmeaning ornament. It was probably cut in England, being coarsely executed, while those used in France at the same time are well cut and artistic. About 1487-88 we find two more books ornamented with woodcuts, the Royal Book and the Speculum Vite Christi. The Speculum contains a number of well-executed cuts, the Royal Book only seven, six of which had appeared in the Speculum.

About 1488 a second edition of the Golden Legend was issued, almost exactly the same as the first, but with the life of St. Erasmus added, so that this edition does not end, like the first, with a blank leaf. At the time of Caxton’s death, he seems to have had a large stock of this book still on his hands, for he left fifteen copies to the Church of St. Margaret, and a large number of copies to his daughter Elizabeth, the wife of Gerard Croppe, a tailor in Westminster. It is hard to understand how, with this large stock still for sale, Wynkyn de Worde could afford to print a new edition in 1493 and another in 1498; for even at the latter date copies of Caxton’s edition were, as we happen to know, still to be obtained.

To about this time may be ascribed the curious Image of Pity in the University Library, Cambridge. It is not printed on a separate piece of paper, but is a sort of proof struck off on the blank last page of a book with which the indulgence has nothing to do. The book is a copy of the Colloquium peccatoris et Crucifixi J. C., printed at Antwerp by Mathias van der Goes about 1487, which must have been accidentally lying near when the printer wanted something to take an impression upon.[32]

[32] For a detailed account of this and other English Images of Pity, see a paper by Henry Bradshaw, reprinted as No. 9 in his Collected Papers, p. 135.

In 1489, Caxton printed two editions of an indulgence of great typographical interest. This indulgence was first noticed by Dr. Cotton, who mentions it in his Typographical Gazetteer under Oxford, supposing it to have been printed at that place. Bradshaw, on seeing a photograph of it, at once conjectured from the form and appearance of the type that it was printed by Caxton, though Blades refused to accept it as a product of his press without further proof, and it was never admitted into any of his books on Caxton. The same type was afterwards found by Bradshaw used for sidenotes in the 1494 edition of the Speculum Vite Christi, printed by W. de Worde, and the type being in his possession at that date, could have belonged in 1489 to no one but Caxton.

In a list of Caxton’s types this type would be known as type 7.