The Book of Cookery, belonging to the Marquis of Bath, was also printed this year. It begins: “Here beginneth a noble boke of festes royalle and cokery, a boke for a pryncis housholde or any other estates, and the makynge therof accordynge as ye shall fynde more playnly within this boke.” Then follows an account of certain great banquets, the feast at the coronation of Henry V; “the earle of Warwick’s feast to the king, the feast of my lorde chancellor archbishop of York at his stallacion in York,” and so on. After the account of the feasts comes the more practical Calendar of Cookery.
Two editions of the Informatio Puerorum, a small grammatical work founded upon the Donatus, were issued about this time. In the colophon of one it is stated that the book was printed for George Chasteleyn and John Bars. I have found no reference anywhere to John Bars, but George Chasteleyn was an Oxford bookseller, carrying on business at the Sign of St John the evangelist in that city. It was for him also that in 1506 Pynson printed an edition of the Principia of Peregrinus de Lugo. About this time there was no press in Oxford, so that books for use in the schools had to be printed in London.
In a scrap-book in the British Museum are some leaves of an edition of the romance of Guy of Warwick which may be ascribed to Pynson, and they are printed in a curious mixture of his early types. These leaves were discovered in 1860 in the binding of a copy of Maydeston’s Directorium Sacerdotum, printed by Pynson in 1501, and an account of them was sent by their discoverer, who signs himself E. F. B., to Notes and Queries. Now, of this edition of the Directorium, only two copies are known, one in the British Museum and one in Ripon Cathedral, and I should very much like to know from which copy these leaves were obtained.
During all the period from 1490 to 1500 Pynson was busy issuing editions of law-books, more than a quarter of his productions being of this class, and it is probable that a considerable number more printed in the fifteenth century may yet be discovered. They are not of a nature to attract much interest, and are generally very badly catalogued, or catalogued in collections and not separately, and in one great English library at least they have no more detailed press mark than Law Room, so it is needless to say I have not yet examined such books as they may have in that library.
Though he did not print so many books as De Worde in the fifteenth century, nevertheless Pynson was evidently a more enterprising and careful printer. He had seven distinct founts of type, all of which were made for him and not inherited from other printers, and the works he produced were of a much more scholarly nature, though this becomes more apparent in his work during the sixteenth century. His patrons were often learned and distinguished men, for whom he produced such splendid work as the Morton Missal, and he became later the recognised king’s printer. In the fifteenth century he printed altogether eighty-eight books known to us.
Pynson, like De Worde, very considerately moved to a new address at the end of the century; previous to 1501 he was in St Clement’s parish, outside Temple Bar, which was the limit, I think, of the parish, but afterwards moved inside Temple Bar, where he carried on business at the Sign of the George. The colophon to the Book of Cookery, printed in 1500, says, “Imprinted without Temple Bar”; the colophon to the Directorium Sacerdotum of 1501 says, “intra barram novi templi,” so that the date is pretty accurately fixed.
LECTURE III.
THE STATIONERS.
In speaking of the history of the printed book in the fifteenth century I have so far dealt only with the printers of London and Westminster; to-day I propose to touch on the books printed abroad for the English market and the stationers who sold them. In the early days the different businesses of a publisher, a bookseller, and a bookbinder were often carried on by one man, who was called a stationer. He bought books wholesale, sometimes having whole editions specially printed for him, he bound them, and then sold them like an ordinary bookseller. He also probably in England, as was certainly done on the Continent, sent round vans full of books to the various provincial towns, timing his arrival as far as possible to coincide with the local fairs.
A considerable number of the books printed abroad for sale in England have no connexion with any particular stationer, but were probably brought over by an agent of the printer and sold in lots to different stationers.