Early Printed Books

by E. Gordon Duff

The Chaucer, in which two types are used, one for the prose and another for the verse, is also earlier than the Dives and Pauper. It is illustrated with a number of badly executed woodcuts, cut specially for the book, of the various pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales. Some of these cuts were altered while the book was passing through the press, and serve again for different characters. The Sergeaunt with a little alteration reappears as the Doctor of Physick, and the Squire is turned into the Manciple.

FROM THE ‘FESTUM NOMINIS JESU.’
PYNSON, C. 1493.

In 1493 the Dives and Pauper appeared. It is printed in a new type, copied evidently from a French model, and strongly resembling some used in Verard’s books. This type superseded the larger type of the Chaucer, which we do not find in use again. To 1493 a number of small books can be assigned, all printed in the type of the Dives and Pauper, and having twenty-five lines to the page. Amongst them we may mention the Festum Nominis Jesu; an edition of Lydgate’s Churl and Bird; a Life of St. Margaret, which is known only from fragments, and a legal work of which there is one leaf in Lambeth Palace Library.

The method of using signatures, which Pynson adopted in these early books, affords another small piece of evidence to prove that he learnt to print at Rouen, and not in England. In the quartos, the first leaf of the quire is signed A 1, the second has no signature, while the third is signed A 2. This way of signing (by the sheet instead of by the leaf), not a very ordinary one, was commonly in use at Rouen; while Caxton and De Worde signed in the more usual manner, with consecutive signatures to each leaf for the first half of the quire.

For some unknown reason, Pynson was dissatisfied with the Dives and Pauper type, for after 1493 it never seems to have been used again. From this time onwards, till about 1500, the majority of his books were printed in the small type of the Chaucer, or in some newer types of a more severe and less French appearance. In his earliest books Pynson used a device consisting of his initials cut in wood, so as to print white upon a black background. It resembles in many ways that of his old associate Le Talleur, and may therefore have been cut in Rouen. In 1496 we find him using two new devices, one a large woodcut containing his mark, and a helmet surmounted by a small bird,[36] which began to break about 1497, and was soon disused. The other, which is a metal cut, is in two pieces, a border of men and flowers, and an interior piece with the mark on a shield and supporters. The border of this device is a most useful guide in determining the dates of the books in which it occurs. In the lower part is a ribbon pierced for the insertion of type. The two ends of the piece below the ribbon were too thin to be strong, so that the piece gets gradually bent in, the ribbon becoming narrower and narrower. According to the bend of this piece the exact year can be ascertained, from 1499, when it began to get displaced, to 1513, when it broke off altogether.

[36] The bird above the helmet is a finch, no doubt a punning allusion to Pynson’s name, Pynson being the Norman word for a finch. Very probably the birds in the large coat of arms are finches also, though Ames calls them eagles.

Among the books which appeared in 1494, the Fall of Princis, translated by Lydgate from Boccaccio, is the most remarkable. It is printed throughout in the smaller type of the Chaucer, and at the head of each part is a woodcut of particularly good execution. The copy of this book in the British Museum, unfortunately imperfect, was rescued from the counter of a small shop where it was being used to make little bags or ‘twists’ to hold pennyworths of sweets. Each leaf has been divided into four pieces. A Grammar of Sulpitius and a Book of Good Manners were also printed with a date in this year. In 1495 no dated books were issued, but the Petronylla and The Art and Craft to know well to Dye must have been issued about this time. In 1496, Pynson printed a small supplement to the first edition of the Hymns and Sequences printed at Cologne by Quentell, and in the following year he issued a complete edition of the book, and an edition of the Horæ ad usum Sarum. In the same year (1497) he printed six of Terence’s plays, each signed separately so that they could be issued apart. About this year were issued two interesting folios, Reynard the Fox, and a Speculum vite Christi, with illustrations. In 1500 was issued the Book of Cookery, of which the only known copy is in the library at Longleat, and the splendid Sarum Missal, printed at the expense of Cardinal Morton, and generally known as the Morton Missal. Of updated books printed about this time we may notice especially, editions of Guy of Warwick, Maundeville’s Travels, Informatio Puerorum, a few small school-books, and a number of year-books and other legal works.

About 1502-3, Pynson changed his residence from outside Temple Bar to the George in Fleet Street, where he continued to the end of his life. His career as a printer is curiously different from Wynkyn de Worde’s. The latter was the popular printer, publishing numbers of slight books of a kind likely to appeal to the public. Pynson, on the other hand, was in a more official position as King’s printer, and seems to have been generally chosen as the publisher of learned books. Wynkyn de Worde printed ten slight books for every one of a more solid character; with Pynson the average was about equal.

From 1510 onwards we find frequent entries relating to Pynson in all the accounts of payments made by Henry VIII., and these show that he was clearly the royal printer, and in receipt of an annuity. In September 1509, he issued the Sermo fratris Hieronymi de Ferraria, which contains the first Roman type used in England. In 1513 appeared the Sege and Dystruccyon of Troye, of which there are several copies known, printed upon vellum.