Rare page from copy of first book printed in England acquired by Western University – London | globalnews.ca

About 550 years ago, William Caxton made history when he set up the first printing press in England and used it to produce copies of the country’s first printed books: the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

More than a millennium and a half later, one of those early copies has found its way into a leaf collection. Western University,

it is not clear How many copies did Caxton actually print in 1476, but it is estimated that about 10 complete first edition copies exist today, as well as about three dozen fragments or individual pages in collections around the world, according to Western. Huh.

Deborah Meert-Williston, a special collections librarian with the Archives and Special Collections of Western Libraries, said the university acquired its Caxton leaf from Peter Harrington, a well-known UK dealer, who displayed the rare piece at the Toronto Antiquarian Book Fair Was.

Harrington had invited Meerut-Williston to see the leaf at the exhibition, but she says she was unable to attend.

“Even though I wasn’t going to sell the book, it caught my attention, and I reached out to Peter Harrington and I said, ‘Is this for sale or is it just an exhibition item?’ And he said, ‘Well, it might be for sale.'”

He said a price was eventually negotiated, with Western paying approximately CAD 20,000 to $25,000, including an educational discount. A complete copy of The Canterbury Tales is expected to fetch over $1 million.

Caxton’s leaf joined six incunabula (a book printed before 1501) already in the Western collection, having been donated to the school in 1918 by the university’s first librarian, John Davis Barnett. He states that the Caxton print represents an important time in the history of the printed word.

The transition came when Johannes Gutenberg of Germany introduced the first metal movable-type printing press in Europe in the mid-15th century, ushering in a new era of communication and fueling the worldwide spread of printing presses.

Meerut-Williston said, “It changed the world in the same way that the Internet changed the world in the 1990s because it provided access to information.” Gutenberg is also known for the Gutenberg Bible, his printing of the Vulgate, a 4th-century Latin translation of the Bible.

Before the printing press, manuscripts had to be created by hand, which was a laborious and expensive process. As a result, “a lot of people didn’t have access to the books,” she said.

“Moveable type now allowed us to start printing things. There was some printing before, but you always had to carve an entire page or a picture or an illustration into a block of wood or some other type of metal or substrate in order to print something. It was very, very time consuming,” she said.

“That’s how everything changed in Europe, and then around the world, for this movable type to take the place of block printing.”

Caxton, Meir-Wilson says, “immediately saw it and understood its value,” and adopted the process, printing the world’s first book in English, The Recoil of the Histories of Troyin Belgium in 1473.

“Then he decided he was going to go to England, because nobody was printing in England, and he wanted to take advantage of the situation. We think they probably printed some smaller things first, some pamphlets, broadsides, things like that,” she said.

“But he wanted to do a great job, and his first choice for a book was The Canterbury Tales. It was very popular … everyone knew (it) through plays or by hearing about those stories. But very few people can ever own one because you must have a medieval manuscript.

Mirt-Williston estimates that Caxton may have printed about 600 copies. the Canterbury TalesHowever the exact figure is not known. It was one of the copies that produce the leaf of the western. A second edition of the book was published a few years later.

“It was a very important book in the Middle Ages, and it remains an important book today. One of the stories was recently made into a film.’ the knight’s tale, first story in the Canterbury Tales, which inspired the 2001 film A Knight’s Tale, Westerns have story lines in their cards.

“I really loved that we were getting another incunabula, that we were getting one that everybody would recognize, because the other six that we have, a lot of students wouldn’t really recognize it … And even though it is a leaf, what it represents is much more than that.”

Early and rare books and medieval manuscripts are often taken apart and sold page by page. This is likely what happened with Western’s Caxton Leaf, Meert-Williston said.

“We have other medieval manuscript clues that we have been able to figure out which book they came from and put them back together digitally, even though the leaves reside all over the world. So it is possible with this leaf. It is for the scholars to do,” he said.

Western officials say the historic leaf will be used as a learning tool for university students studying medieval literature, book conservation and more.

In a statement, Richard Moll, professor and medieval studies program director, said he would be integrating the Caxton prints into his curriculum on medieval studies.

“For teaching, it’s fantastic. When students see these physical examples they are overjoyed. There’s an immediacy to seeing how, in the late 1400s, they were consuming Chaucer,” he said.

Meert-Willison says the leaf will also be used by researchers studying rare books and incunabula, focusing on text layout and paper quality. He noted that copies of the first edition sometimes differ slightly from each other.

“The monetary value of our collections is not really what we focus on at all. It’s the research and teaching value from our collections,” she said.

“So our focus is, is there value to the teaching and research? I already have this particular item, the Caxton Leaf, booked for five classes over the next two months, so it’s already popular.” It is there and it will be put to good use.