William Caxton : A Quincentenary Biography of England's First Printer

Chatto & Windus, London, first edition, 1976. Cloth, 8vo, 25 cm,. xi, 227 pp, [4] leaves of plates. From the foreword: "Caxton is one of the most famous yet least known of great Englishmen. The sources for his eventful life are unexpectedly rich and varied, but have not as yet been adequately studied and interpreted. They range from the abundant contemporary documents in which his name and affairs are mentioned, to the hundred surviving editions of books from his press, with their texts, types, and woodcut illustrations, and the revealing and entertaining prologues and epilogues which he wrote for them. An attractive and original but distinctively English character emerges, a man of gusto, piety and humour, of business acumen and enduring political loyalties, a gifted compulsive writer with a special delight in printing his own works, an editor-publisher of Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and Malory who enriched English literature by translating the bestsellers of France and Burgundy, and the offstage companion, as propagandist and protégé of Yorkist and Tudor royalty and nobility, of the heroes and villains of Shakespeare's Henry VI and Richard III. In this biography I have described and discussed every known Caxton document and edition, both intrinsically and in relation to the events, persons, and movements of contemporary history in which Caxton was so intimately involved. I have tried to rectify the disconcertingly many established and hitherto unsuspected errors of fact or inference in the work of William Blades, E. G. Duff, W.J. B. Crotch and others, to bring new light and truth to all aspects of Caxton's career from an independent study of the primary sources, and to write for the general reader, the student, and the specialist scholar alike. New conclusions are reached on Caxton's family connections, his early activities as apprentice in London and cloth-trader at Bruges, his appointment and fall as Governor of the English merchants in the Low Countries, his diplomatic missions in the protracted trade negotiations of the 1460s, his discovery of his vocation for writing and printing, his relationships with his instructor Johann Veldener and Colard Mansion his associate, and the foundation and chronology of his first press at Bruges...Caxton's hitherto unrealised function as a Yorkist and Tudor propagandist is explored in detail as a major key to his entire career as a printer. New information is given on the sources and authorship of Caxton texts previously misattributed, and dates are supplied on new typographical and other evidence for many of Caxton's undated editions." Contents: 1 The Family; 2 The Apprentice; 3 The Merchant; 4 The Governor; 5 The Diplomat; 6 The Exile; 7 Learning to Print at Cologne; 8 Printing at Bruges 1 : Margaret and Clarence; 9 Printing at Bruges 2: Colard Mansion; 10 A Shop in the Abbey; 11 At the Red Pale; 12 Friends in Court; 13 Under which King?; 14 Orders of Chivalry; 15 With a Strange Device; 16 The Two Queen Mothers & The Art of Dying; Notes on the Illustrations; Select Bibliography; References; Chronological List of Caxton's Editions; Caxton's Device as Evidence for Dating; Index. T.A. Birrrell's copy, with his name stamped on the title-page, and a pencil inscription from Anna Simoni on the front free endpaper. A few neat pencil notes, Very Good in Very Good price-clipped dustwrapper.