Caxton, WILLIAM

Caxton, WILLIAM, the first English printer, was born in the Weald of Kent about 1422. He was apprenticed in 1438 to Robert Large, a wealthy London mercer, who was Lord Mayor in 1439–40. On his master's death in 1441, he went to Bruges; he prospered in business, and became in 1462 governor of a chartered association of English merchants in the Low Countries. In 1471 he abandoned commerce and attached himself to the household of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of Edward IV.; and apparently towards the end of 1476 he set up his wooden printing-press at the sign of the Red Pale in the Almonry at Westminster. The art of printing he had acquired during his sojourn in Bruges, doubtless from Colard Mansion, a well-known printer of that city; and in 1474 he put through the press at Bruges the first book printed in the English tongue, the Reenyell of the Histories of Troye, a translation of Raoul Lefevre's work. The Game and Playe of the Chesse was another of Caxton's earliest publications; but the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers, published in 1477, is the first book which can with certainty be maintained to have been printed in England. All the eight founts of type from which Caxton printed may be called Black Letter. Of the ninety-nine known distinct productions of his press, no less than thirty-eight survive in unique copies or in fragments only. His books have no title-pages, although many have prologues and colophons. Some have no points at all; others the full-stop and colon alone. The semicolon never occurs; the comma is usually marked by short (,) or by long (|) lines. The pages are not numbered and have no catchwords. (For Caxton's imprint, see article BOOK.) Caxton enjoyed the patronage and friendship of some of the chief men of his time. He was diligent in the exercise of his craft or in translation till within a few hours of his death, which seems to have happened about the close of the year 1491. Gibbon denounces Caxton's choice of books, and complains that 'the world is not indebted to England for one first edition of a classic author; but it should be remembered that Caxton had to make his printing business pay, and that he could therefore supply only books for which there was a demand. Nor can it be said that a printer had no regard for pure literature who produced editions of Chaucer, Lydgate, Gower, Sir Thomas Malory's King Arthur, and translations of Cicero's De Senectute and De Amicitia. Caxton's industry was marvellous. He was an accomplished linguist, and the translations which he executed himself fill more than 4500 printed pages, while the total produce of his press, exclusive of the books printed at Bruges, reaches to above 18,000, nearly all of folio size. At the Osterley Park sale in 1885, no less than ten Caxtons were sold; one of them, the Chesse, bringing £1950. In 1877 the printer and his work were fittingly commemorated by a typographical exhibition in London. See The Old Printer and the New Press, by Charles Knight (1854); Life and Typography of William Caxton (1861–63), by W. Blades; and the Biography and Typography of Caxton (1877; 2d. ed. 1882), by the same author.