William Caxton

a Frenchman working in Venice.

Caxton never employed it, and it was not introduced into England until 1509.

In that year, Richard Pinson, a London printer and a naturalized Englishman, though Norman by birth, used some Roman type in portions of the Sermo-Fratris Hieronymi de Ferrara and in fifteen eighteen he produced horatio riccardi passeate which was entirely printed in these characters Had the idea of the title page, in the modern sense of the term, a very obvious idea, as it seems to us, occurred to the first printers, we should not have to sharpen our wits on the 101 doubtful points with which the subject of early bibliography bristles.

Today, the title page not only introduces the book itself, but declares the name of the writer, and the publisher and the time and place of publication but during the first sixty years of printing title pages were rare and the old methods followed by the scribes in writing their manuscript books still obtained the subject matter began with incipit or here beginneth etc according to the language in which the work was written and such information as the printer considered it desirable to impart was contained in the colophon or note affixed to the end of the book more often than not these colophons are irritatingly reticent and withhold the very thing we want to know At other times they are informing, and in some cases amusing.

this device continued to be used after the death of aldus minutius in fifteen fifteen by his descendants who carried on the work of the press until fifteen ninety seven france was somewhat late in availing herself of the advantages offered by the new art although peter schoeffer had had a bookseller's shop in paris in fourteen seventy guillaume fiche rector of the sorbonne invited three german printers ulrich gring michael freiburger and martin kranz to come and set up a printing-press at the sorbonne the first work they produced there was the epistale of gasparinus For this and a few other volumes they used a very beautiful Roman type, but after the closing of the Sorbonne Press in 1472, they established other presses elsewhere in Paris and adopted a Gothic character similar to that of the contemporary French manuscripts, and therefore more likely to be popular with French readers.

the first work printed in the french language however is believed to have been executed chiefly at any rate by an englishman probably at bruges five years later that is about fourteen seventy six The book was Les Recueils des Histoires des Troyes.

The Englishman was William Caxton.

Caxton also printed at the same place, and about the year 1475, the first book in the English language, a translation of Les Recueils.

And so I think it's, it's unsurprising that when the first printing press is introduced, um, in England in 1476, so again, again, that's against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses, the merchant responsible for it very rapidly is looking around for something to publish about King Arthur.

And this publisher is a guy called William Caxton, and he is a top entrepreneur.

I mean, publishing is just one of the many irons that he has in the fire, and he has a very keen sense of what the public wants.

And so he comes across this manuscript called The Morte d'Arthur, um, a posthumous manuscript left by a, a knight called Thomas Malory, who's, who's since died.

And he reads it and he says, "Oh, this is brilliant.

We've gotta, we've gotta publish this." And so because Malory is already dead, Caxton can essentially do what he like with it.

He can trim it, edit it, mark it as he, as he wants, and he does a tremendous job.

Um, and the result is a massive bestseller.

By good luck, the great printer who made it one of his first works has left an account of the circumstances that led to its production.

In the reign of Edward IV, William Caxton set up his printing press, the first in England, in the precincts of Westminster Abbey.

There he was visited, as he himself relates, by many noble and diverse gentlemen, demanding why he had not printed the noble history of the Saint Grail and of the most renowned Christian king, Arthur.

To please them, and because he himself loved chivalry, Caxton printed Sir Thomas Malory's story, in which all that is best in the many Arthurian romances is woven into one grand narrative.

Since then, in our own days, the story of Arthur and his knights has been told in beautiful verse by Lord Tennyson.

But for the originals of some of his poems, it would be useless to look in Malory.

I'm still very, very sad about Michael Mosley's death, says June in Frankston South.

I remember reading when Diana died that either Harry or William asked why all these people were crying as they didn't even know her, says Narelle.

Another text says, hi, Kirsten, are these increasing parasocial relationships linked to increased loneliness? Loneliness is an increasing issue in our society because the identity is a constant, whereas those in the person's life may not be constant.

That's one from Dorothy.

But also...

The early printers were also quite excited by European spelling conventions.

So even, you know, William Caxton, for example, who, you know, introduced Dutch spellings like the G-H in ghost and ghastly.

Now, that's hardly helpful for English, that G-H. shouldn't be there, and that would be an easy reform, actually.

Printing technology also played a starring role.

Gutenberg's movable type appeared in 1439, but it was William Caxton's press in London around 1476 that really set the stage for a standardized spelling system based on the Chancery standard and the London dialect.

This standardization made it easier to publish books and spread ideas.

When we look back at pronunciation evidence, runic data gives us only fragments.

Hogg's 1992 work on orthography and phonology gives us a framework to read those medieval spellings into actual sounds.

And last, with his early essays on evidence and reconstruction, reminds us that every rune or scribe's hand is a clue, not a definitive guide.

Fast forward to the late 15th century, when William Caxton set up a press in London.

Suddenly, you had books printed in a single dialect, London English, instead of handwritten manuscripts that varied wildly from one scribe to another.