Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
During Caxton's lifetime only one other Englishman set up a press, an
anonymous schoolmaster at St. Albans, who began work in 1480 (possibly
in 1479) and printed till 1486, producing first six scholastic books and
then two English ones. He appears to have borrowed some type from
Caxton, so that it was presumably with the latter's goodwill that he
reprinted his version of the _Chronicles of England_, adding thereto an
appendix entitled _Fructus Temporum_, or Fruits of Time. It is from
Wynkyn de Worde's reprint of this edition in 1497 that we obtain our
only knowledge of the printer, for we are there told that it was
"compiled in a booke and also enprynted by one sometyme scolemayster of
saynt Albons, on whose soule God haue mercy." His other popular book was
that famous trio of treatises _Of Haukyng and Huntyng and also of
Cootarmuris_, commonly known as the _Book of St. Albans_. The second
treatise, which is in metre, ends with the words "Explicit Dam Julyan
Barnes in her boke of huntyng," and this is the only basis for the
popular attribution of all three treatises to a hypothetical Juliana
Bernes or Berners, who is supposed to have been the daughter of Sir
James Berners (executed in 1388), and Prioress of the Nunnery of
Sopwell, a dependency of St. Albans, of which the list of prioresses
has conveniently perished.[47]
Between 1478 and 1486 or '87, some seventeen books were printed at
Oxford by Theodoric Rood of Cologne, who towards the end of his career
was in partnership with an English bookseller named Thomas Hunte. The
earliest of his books,[48] all of which are in Latin, was an Exposition
on the Apostles' Creed wrongly attributed to S. Jerome. By the
accidental omission of an X this is dated MCCCCLXVIII, i.e. 1468, but
such misprints are common in early books, and no one now maintains that
it was printed until ten years later. Among the other books printed at
Oxford we may note an edition of Cicero's _Pro Milone_, the spurious
Letters of Phalaris, and a very large folio, Lyndewode's _Provincial
Constitutions_ of the English Church. That the Oxford press came to an
end so soon and that none was started at Cambridge during the fifteenth
century may be attributed to a statute of Richard III's permitting the
free importation of books into England. Although this measure was amply
justified by the interests of learning, it made it practically
impossible for any scholastic press to maintain itself in the limited
English market against the competition of the fine editions which could
be imported from Italy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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