SPECULUM VITAE CHRISTI
(see page [67])]
The Directorium is a folio of 160 leaves, the first, which is wanting in the only known copy, having been most probably blank.
About this year the first edition of Bonaventura's Speculum Vitae Christi was issued, remarkable for its illustrations. These, though not large, are much more graceful in design and better in execution than any which preceded them, and are clearly the work of a new engraver. It is a curious fact that in neither edition which he printed did Caxton use the full series of these cuts, for odd illustrations appear in later books which clearly belong to the set, but which had not been made use of before. Besides the regular series, a few smaller cuts occur, much ruder in execution.
These belong to a set cut for an edition of the Horae ad usum Sarum, but the early editions of this book are known only from fragments, so that we cannot ascertain how many there were in the original series.
Several of these Speculum cuts reappear in the Royal Book, a translation of La Somme des vices et vertus, published very shortly after. This book at present enjoys the distinction of having brought the highest price hitherto paid for a Caxton, a copy having been sold (March 20, 1902) for the sum of £2,225. The history of this particular copy is an interesting one. It belonged early in the seventeenth century to Thomas Archer, parson of Houghton Conquest, Bedfordshire, who bequeathed it to the Church Library of St. John's, Bedford. This library was afterwards moved to St. Paul's Church, Bedford, and about 1840 transferred to the Bedford Literary Institute. The council of this Institute, entirely ignoring their moral obligations, determined to make money out of so valuable a book, and not only did they do so, but they also did their best to destroy one of the very few existing evidences of Caxton's work. The book when I examined it several years ago was in its original binding, tooled with stamps which we have many reasons for believing belonged to Caxton himself. This Bedford book afforded the strongest proof of all, for the boards of the binding were lined with unused copies of one issue of Caxton's 1481 Indulgences. Of these there had originally been four, two at each end, but two had been abstracted. When the book was sold the remaining two were taken out and sold separately, thus destroying for ever a most valuable piece of evidence. This book, together with one of the Indulgences, is now in a private library in America.
A few years ago Mr. Robert Proctor, working in the library of New College, Oxford, found in the binding of a book two small slips of vellum with some printing upon them in Caxton's type No. 5. These turned out to be portions of a leaf of a hitherto unknown Caxton, an edition of the Donatus melior, revised by Mancinellus, printed in folio. They are also the earliest specimens of Caxton's use of vellum. The date of the book would be about 1487.