WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557 cover

The English provincial printers, stationers and bookbinders to 1557

Chapter 2: PREFACE
By E. Gordon Duff
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

History - British

About This Book

A detailed historical survey traces the development and activity of printers, stationers, and bookbinders operating outside London up to 1557, examining the presses established in university towns and provincial centres. It catalogs the towns where printing occurred, outlines careers of individual practitioners, and analyzes typographical features such as types, woodcuts, ornaments, and devices. The narrative situates provincial output within religious and political contexts, notes misleading imprints and externally printed works intended for local sale, and reproduces representative title-pages and colophons. Two appendices provide a title list with locations of surviving copies and a bibliography to guide further research, while chronological and institutional changes culminating in the 1557 charter are explained.

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.

My thanks are due for permission to have facsimiles made from books in their charge to the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, the Master and Fellows of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and to the authorities of the British Museum and the Cambridge University Library.

E. G. D.

October 1911.