BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
ON
ONE HUNDRED BOOKS
FAMOUS IN
ENGLISH LITERATURE
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
(1340?-1400)
1. [The Canterbury Tales. Printed at Westminster by William Caxton, about 1478.]
The text begins with the first line of the book, and there is no prefatory note or colophon, to give a clue to the name of the work, its place of publication, its printer, or the date of its production. The date and the name of the printer, however, are determined by the type, which is a font used by Caxton in books printed at Westminster between the years 1475 and 1481. This type, known as Type No. 2, because it was the second employed by him (the first used for printing books in England), is like the characters in manuscripts written in Bruges in the fifteenth century, and called "Gros Bâtarde." Colard Mansion, the earliest printer of Bruges, used a font of similar style, and Caxton probably formed his type on the same models, if, indeed, he did not procure it from Mansion himself, with whom he learned the new art of printing. But we may also identify our printer by means of his own statement made in the signed "Prohemye" to the second edition of the work, printed in 1484 (?), where, in speaking of the difficulty of obtaining a pure text, he makes an interesting criticism of this, the first edition. He says:
"For I fynde many of the sayd bookes, whyche wry- | ters haue abrydgyd it and many thynges left out, And in | so