Lettou seems to have been assisted during the first two years of his career by a certain William Wilcock, but who this man may have been I have not been able to discover, unless he was a certain William Wilcock who is mentioned in the State Papers as having been presented to the living of Llandussell in 1487. The two books printed by Lettou were the Questiones Antonii Andreae super duodecim libros metaphisice and the Expositiones super Psalterium of Thomas Wallensis. Both these books are printed in a neat small Italian gothic, with two columns to the page and forty-nine or fifty lines in a column. The first of the two books, the Antonius Andreae, is a small folio of 106 leaves, and almost all the six known copies are imperfect. The book is very probably reprinted from the edition printed at Vicenza in 1477, the only earlier edition than the present, which, like it, is edited by Thomas Penketh. Penketh was a friar of the Augustinian house at Warrington, but went later as teacher of theology to Padua. He returned to Oxford in 1477, where he also taught theology, and was probably living there when his book was being printed at London.
The second of these two books is printed in exactly the same style and form as the first, with the exception of having fifty lines to the column in place of forty-nine. In the imprint the book is ascribed to the “Reverendissimus dominus Valencius,” that is Jacobus Perez de Valentia, who was, however, not the author of this work, though he did write a commentary on the Psalms. The real author was a certain Thomas Wallensis or de Walleis. Henry Bradshaw, who discovered the mistake, gives the following explanation of it: “This edition is printed from an incomplete copy, and from the words of the colophon ‘Reverendissimi domini Valencii,’ the final s having been misread as an i, the work has been confounded with the commentary of Jacobus Perez de Valencia, which was printed at that place in 1484 and 1493. The v for w and the absence of the Christian name would also serve to create the confusion, or at any rate to perpetuate it.”
Three editions of the indulgence of John Kendale were printed by Lettou in 1480. The first two have been preserved in a very curious manner. It was a common custom of the early binders to paste a thin strip of vellum down the centre of each quire of paper in order to prevent the thread which ran down the centre of the quire and stitched it to the bands of the binding from cutting through the paper. A copy of a foreign printed Bible, which appears to have been bound in England, perhaps by Lettou himself, and which is now in the library of Jesus College, Cambridge, has the centre of each quire throughout the book lined with a strip of vellum, part of cut up copies of these two indulgences. Indulgences having their year printed upon them soon went out of date, and as they were of vellum and printed only on one side were very much used by bookbinders for lining bindings. These two indulgences were issued early in the year and have the date 1480, but no mention is made of the pontifical year of the pope. The third indulgence, of which a copy is in the British Museum, also dated 1480, has besides, the date of the pontifical year, “the year of our pontificate the tenth,” and as the popes dated like the kings, from the exact date of their accession or coronation, this copy must have been printed after August 7, 1480, on which date the tenth year of Sixtus IV began.
After the printing of his two books and editions of the indulgence, Lettou entered into partnership with a printer called Wilhelmus de Machlinia, a native, as his name shows, of Mechlin in Belgium. Together they printed five books, the Tenores Novelli of Littelton, the Abridgement of the Statutes, and the Year-books of the thirty-third, thirty-fifth, and thirty-sixth years of Henry VI.
For these books the printers used a small very cramped black letter, abounding in abbreviations, and often difficult to read. It appears to have been designed after the law hand of the period. The edition of the Tenures is the only one of these books with an imprint, and it contains the names of both printers, and the statement that the book was printed in the city of London, “juxta ecclesiam omnium sanctorum.” There were, however, several churches in London at this time dedicated to All Saints, and it is not possible now to settle which particular one was meant. Complete sets of these five books are in the British Museum and the Cambridge University Library.
The entire change in the character of the books produced after Machlinia had joined Lettou shows that his strong point was legal printing, and during his continuance in business he seems to have printed all the law-books issued in England. But perhaps the most marked peculiarity of his partnership is the extraordinary deterioration in the books produced. The work of Lettou was marked by excellence of typography and the many improvements introduced by an evidently practised printer. As soon as Machlinia joined him the work became slovenly. It might be supposed that Mr William Wilcock, who had defrayed the expense of Lettou’s work, had either tried it as a speculation and found it a poor one, or had only wished the two books to be specially printed for his own use and had then left the printer to shift for himself. It is curious, too, that Lettou’s neat type should have entirely disappeared. The real reason for this probably was that though it was very neat it had none of the abbreviations necessary in a type used for printing law-books.
While Lettou remained in the firm the work, though much deteriorated, retained a certain amount of regularity. All the books had signatures and were regular in size, though their appearance was not good. After the issue of these five books Lettou seems to have ceased printing, but the type was used for one more book, which it will be well to notice here, The History of the Siege of Rhodes. This was written in Latin by Gulielmus Caorsin, vice-chancellor of the Knights of Malta, and was translated into English by John Kay, who styles himself poet-laureate to Edward IV. It gives an account of the great victory of the Rhodians against the Turks and the death of Mahomet.
It is the only early English printed book which we cannot definitely ascribe to any particular printer. By most early writers it was classed as a production of Caxton, and Dibdin places it under Caxton in his Typographical Antiquities, though he there expresses a doubt as to its being his work. “The typography,” he says, “is so rude as to induce me to suppose that the book was not printed by Caxton. The oblique dash for the comma is very coarse; and the adoption of the colon and the period, as well as the comparatively wide distances between the lines, are circumstances which, as they are not to be found in Caxton’s acknowledged publications, strongly confirm this supposition.” Five years later, writing in the Bibliotheca Spenceriana, he seems to have settled more accurately. “I have very little doubt,” he writes there, “of its having been executed by Lettou and Machlinia, or by the former of these printers, rather than by Caxton. The letters, however, great and small, especially the larger ones, and some of the compound smaller ones, bear a strong resemblance to the smallest types of our first printer; but on a comparison with those of the Tenures of Lyttelton and the Ancient Abridgement of the Statutes, printed by Lettou and Machlinia, the resemblance is quite complete.” The type is certainly that used by Lettou and Machlinia, and the considerable difference in appearance from the other five books is caused by the text being in English, which makes more difference than would be imagined, and also that there are very few of the abbreviations which crowd the other books. Then again the lines of type are spaced out, giving the page a much lighter appearance.
Though the dedication is to Edward IV, it does not necessarily follow that the book was printed before his death, for the early printers in reprinting a manuscript would keep to the preface as there written. It might, however, have been printed as early as 1483, and immediately the law books had been completed. Who the printer was I do not think can ever be settled. When it was printed Machlinia had probably started by himself with his new types, and I do not think it can have been printed by Lettou, as it has not the signatures to the pages which he invariably used.
We may, I think, date the break up of the partnership of John Lettou and William de Machlinia about 1482-83, and from that date onwards Machlinia worked alone. He seems to have made a fresh start with new type, for he has at least three founts which had not been used before. The difficulties in the way of making any arrangement or arriving at any definite conclusions about his books are very great. We know that he printed at least twenty-two books, and not one single one is dated. Signatures, directors, headlines, seem to be present or absent without rule or reason. There is hardly any method of arranging the books in groups, every book stands alone in splendid isolation.