Sales catalogue 533: Maggs Bros

Date:
1930
Reference:
WA/HMM/CM/Sal/13/88
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sales catalogue 533: Maggs Bros. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    37/294 page 19
    Westminster William Caxton: a.p. 1477-1491. First English printer. William Caxton was born in the Weald of Kent in 1421. Caxton learnt the craft of printing quite late in life, seemingly at Cologne, in 1471, by helping to produce the first edition of Bartholomacus’ De preprietatibus rerum. About 1474 he set up a press at Bruges in partnership with Colard Mansion. At Michaelmas, 1476, William Caxton, having lately returned from Bruges, hired a shop in the Sanctuary at Westminster and there set up the first English printing press. In the autumn of the following year there issued from his press The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophers. From 1477 to his death in 1491 his press was never idle, though his own personal energies must have been mainly occupied with the numerous books which he edited or translated for printing. Altogether seven different fonts of type were used by Caxton at Westminster. They fall into two classes: bdtarde types of the Flemish school; and lettres de forme more on the model of pointed Gothic types of the Mainz school. Almost all the books which Caxton issued were of a popular character, not intended for scholars but for well-to-do and fairly educated readers. Poems of Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate, several romances, chronicles, the Golden Legend, moral treatises, books of devotion, a few Horae and a Psalter were the chief issues from the first English press. The productions of England’s first printer, for long collected and treasured in private collections, have during the last century been fast disappearing into public libraries, and to-day the appearance of a complete Caxton in the book-market is one of the rarest of occurrences. Device: Monogram W. C., with a woodcut border above and below. L19]
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