Illustrated books -- Bibliography; Illustration of books; Printing -- History
Caxton's press was at Westminster, which in the fifteenth century was
much more sharply distinguished for business purposes from the city of
London than it is now. The first press set up within the city itself
was that of John Lettou, whose surname shows him to have been a native
of Lithuania, which in Caxton's time, as in Chaucer's, was known in
England as Lettowe. Mr. Gordon Duff thinks that John Lettou must have
learnt to print at Rome and brought his punches with him to England, as
the type with which he started to print here is indistinguishable from
one used by a small printer at Rome, who bore the curiously English name
John Bulle, though he came from Bremen. Lettou printed an Indulgence in
1480, and also a commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, a curiously
learned work for a city press, but which he was commissioned to print by
a certain William Wilcocks, for whom the next year he printed also a
commentary on the Psalms.
After 1482 Lettou was joined by William of Mechlin, or Malines, in
Belgium, usually known by the Latin name of his birthplace, Machlinia.
Lettou and Machlinia printed five law books together, and then Lettou
disappears and Machlinia in 1483 started working by himself, at first at
a house near the bridge over the Fleet, where he printed eight books,
and then in Holborn, where he printed fourteen. When working by himself
he printed in addition to law books some works of a more popular
character, a Book of Hours, the _Revelation to a Monk of Evesham_,[49]
_Speculum Christiani_ (a devotional work interspersed with English
verse), the _Chronicles of England_, and several editions of "A little
treatise against the Pestilence" by a certain Bishop Canutus of Aarhus.
One of these editions was the first English book which has a titlepage.
It is printed in two lines, and reads:--
"A passing gode lityll boke necessarye &
behouefull agenst the Pestilens."
The exact date at which Machlinia died, or gave up work, is not known.
He was printing in 1486, but his books after that are undated. We may
take 1490 or a little earlier as the year of his disappearance, and it
is practically certain that his stock of books was taken over by Richard
Pynson from Normandy, who probably began printing in 1491 or 1492 (his
first dated book was finished in November of the latter year), and while
he was getting his workshop ready commissioned Guillaume Le Talleur of
Rouen to print two law books for him for sale in England.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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