E. Gordon Duff

“ In it he points out how much more correct and well printed his work is as compared with that of Robert Redman, or more properly Rudeman, for among a thousand it would be hard to find one more unskilled. He wonders how he can call himself a printer, unless the devil made him one when he made the cobbler into a skipper. Formerly the scoundrel professed himself as skilled a bookseller as ever came from Utopia, well knowing a thing can be called a book when it has merely the appearance of one and little else. ”

“ When we consider the places where presses were at work during this period, or where stationers lived who commissioned books, it seems surprising that other towns of equal or greater importance have nothing to show printed or published in them. So much that has come down to us has survived by so slender a chance that there is always the hope that further information may be found and other towns added to our list. Hereford is only represented in a colophon by the unique copy of one book, Exeter by two books which have been lost for over a hundred and fifty years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Hessels, and one that is hardly worthy of so learned a writer, is that since the Costeriana look older than the first Mainz books, therefore they are older. The foolishness of this reasoning is too apparent to need any explanation, for it amounts to the assertion that the same phase of development in different countries means the same date. But if the earliest dated books of the Low Countries are compared with the productions of Germany, it needs a prejudiced eye to see in the former any approach to the exquisite beauty and regularity of the German type and printing. ”

“ It is a curious and amusing coincidence that Jenson should here be mentioned as introducing printing into Venice in place of the real first printer, John of Spire, for Jenson’s often repeated claim to be the first printer of Venice rests upon exactly the same grounds as the Oxford printer’s claim to be the first printer in England, a date in a colophon with a numeral, x, accidentally omitted. ”

“ Having now disposed of Caxton’s only rival, let us turn to Caxton himself. It would, I think, be out of place here to recapitulate however shortly the history of Caxton’s early life, since it has been so fully and excellently done in that standard book Blades’s Life of Caxton. What is more to our purpose is to pass on to the time when, as an influential and prosperous man, he laid the foundations of his career as a printer. ”

“ When speaking of fragments of books as binder’s waste, I mean books which have been in circulation, and have been thrown away as useless. The value of such fragments is principally in themselves. They may or may not be of interest. But by printer’s waste I mean ... waste, proof, or cancelled sheets in the printer’s office, which, in the early days when printers were their own bookbinders, would be used by the bookbinder for lining the boards, or the centres of quires, of books bound in the same office where they were printed. ”