BY SINGULAR good fortune, I was in Antwerp the day before this little exhibition opened in the University of London. There, the Frenchman Christopher Plantin (1514-89), a member of the city Guild of St Luke from 1550, had established a printing press. In 1572, he published a Polyglot Bible (Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and Syriac), and, in 1576, he moved to a house on the Vrijdagmarkt, which now serves as the famed Plantin-Moretus Museum. His workshop holds the Western world’s oldest printing presses, as well as tens of thousands of books.
Printing and publishing north of the Alps was concentrated in Flanders in the 15th century when Flanders was part of the Duchy of Burgundy. Coming from Kent, William Caxton was an apprentice Mercer when the cloth and haberdashery trade was largely centred on the Low Countries. By the 1450s, he was living in Bruges as a merchant trader, becoming governor of the English fraternity there in the 1460s. As a businessman, he made the canny decision to flood the English market with print copies of the popular romances and tales in translation which circulated in the Burgundian court among the elite.
The Senate House Library has a holding of early printed books, including The Game of Chess, printed by Caxton in Flanders in 1474 and on show here. Dr Karen Attar and Dr Michael Durrant rightly think it important to celebrate the 550th anniversary this year of Caxton’s bringing his printing press to London, where he established a shop in Westminster Abbey, at the sign of the Red Pale. At his death in 1492, his business was taken over by his German collaborator, Wynkyn de Worde, who moved his premises to Fleet Street. Later publishers and booksellers rented space in St Paul’s Cathedral.
In seven display cabinets, 21 volumes or pages are displayed, including a single leaf from the Chronicle of England (1480), a copy of the 1539 “Great” Bible and, as important, the 1542 publication of The Great Book of Statutes defining wherein lay the king’s secular authority. Later publications include a Civil War newsletter (Mercurius Civicus: Londons Intelligencer for 6-13 July 1643) and Daniel Defoe’s 1719 Robinson Crusoe.
Given that more than 100 editions are credited to Caxton, this anniversary is well worth marking — but by a much larger exhibition than this sets out to offer.
“The English Print Revolution: Caxton and Beyond” is in the Convocation Hall, Senate House Library, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1, until 1 July. Phone 020 7862 8500. london.ac.uk/senate-house-library
