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XVII. PRINTED BOOKS, THE
BOOKxTJRADE, AND LIBRARIES
TCountries.
1
i. Printing
THE introducer of printing into England, William
Caxton, was born in Kent about the year 1421 . Most of
his life was spent in business on the Continent, where he
became Governor of the English Nation in the Low
By the year 1469 he had also entered the service of
the duchess of Burgundy, for whom he made various trans'
lations. His work proved popular, but the task of copying
becoming burdensome he decided to multiply copies of his
translations by the novel art of printing. Caxton seems to have
learnt this in Cologne, but it was at Bruges that he printed, with
the assistance of Colard Mansion, in 1475, the Recuyell of tbt
Historyes of Troye, the first book printed in the English lan^
guage. Caxton returned to England in the foliowing year, and
set up a printing press at Westminster. In 1477 his first dated
book,theD/rtoor SayengisoftbePhilos0phers,2Lppeaxed(PL 122).
From that date to 1491 Caxton printed ninetysix separate
books, the most notable being Chaucer's Canterbury Tales,
Malory's Morte d*Arthur, and the Golden Legend.
Caxton died in 1491 and left all his materials to his ap^
prentice, Wynkyn de Worde, who printed over one hundred
books in the fifteenth century. In 1 500 De Worde moved from
Westminster to London, where he continued working until
1 53 5, by which time he had printed nearly 800 different books.
The other fifteentlvcentury printers of Westminster and
1 The Governor was an official of the association of Merchant Adventurers;
he was elected by the members who resided in the Low Countries. His head-'
quarters were at Bruges, He acted as an arbitrator in disputes between English
merchants and represented them in correspondence with the home government.
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