The Sandars Lectures 1911 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS London: FETTER LANE, E.C. C. F. CLAY, MANAGER [Illustration] Edinburgh: 100 PRINCES STREET Berlin: A. ASHER AND CO. Leipzig: F. A. BROCKHAUS New York: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS Bombay and Calcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. _All rights reserved_ The English Provincial Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders to 1557 by E. GORDON DUFF, M.A. Oxon. Sometime Sandars Reader in Bibliography in the University of Cambridge Cambridge at the University Press 1912 TO MY FRIEND ALFRED WILLIAM POLLARD PREFACE The work of the provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders forms a subject of the greatest interest, and one which has hitherto hardly received adequate attention. The presses of the two University towns, Oxford and Cambridge, have been very fully treated, and, in a lesser degree, those of St Alban’s and York, but with these exceptions the remaining towns have been curiously neglected, and our knowledge concerning such important printing centres as Ipswich, Worcester and Canterbury seems to have advanced but little since Herbert issued the third volume of his Typographical Antiquities over a hundred and twenty years ago. The period during which these three cities possessed printing presses was an eventful one in England owing to religious and political troubles, and it is probable that among the many anonymous and secretly printed books issued at that time, a certain number were produced in the provincial towns. There is still much to be learned about these provincial presses. The careers of the printers, their types, their woodcuts, their ornaments have still to be traced, and a number of books which have disappeared within recent years remain to be rediscovered. For the benefit of anyone desiring to follow up the subject more fully two appendices have been added to the present book. The first contains a title list of all the provincial books issued during the period, with an indication of the libraries where they are preserved; the second, a list of bibliographical works and articles, general and particular, dealing with the provincial press.