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Early English Printing, a series of facsimiles of all the types used in England during the fifteenth century, with some of those used in the printing of English Books abroad. With an introduction by E. Gordon Duff. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tribner, &• Co., 1896, fol. Imprint. Oxford, printed by Horace Hart, at the Clarendon Press, with types cast from http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ matrices given to the University by Bishop Fell before 1687. Pp. 3d., with forty collotype plates. Price £1 as. net.

STUDENTS of the early history of printing in England have had to wait •a long time for Mr. Gordon Duffs portfolio of facsimiles, but their con- fidence that it would be worth waiting for has not been misplaced. The forty collotype plates which it contains are admirable specimens of repro- duction, and the brilliancy of the printing in red deserves special praise. The only fault that can be found is that the excessive glaze which has been given to the paper, in order to increase the brilliancy of the repro- ductions, makes it difficult to handle in the present, and in the future is at Stockholms Universitet on July 15, 2015 not unlikely to destroy it altogether. This is a matter of importance, and we are surprised that the Clarendon Press, with all its resources, was not able to find a paper which should have been free from these dangers without offering too intractable a surface to the printer. But the difficulty is no new one; unfortunately both in England and France the temporary advantages of highly glazed paper seem to be winning for it greater favour every year. Many of Mr. Duff's forty plates contain two or more reproductions, so that, if we have reckoned rightly, the total number is no less than sixty- four. Of these, eleven are facsimiles of printer's devices, of which Caxton possessed one, the St. Albans Press another, Wynkyn de Worde and Pynson, during the fifteenth century, three each, and Julian Notary the -same number. One of these shows his own name, another his initials combined with those of J. Barbier, and the third (and earliest) the initials of himself, Barbier, and their partner, I.H., whom Mr. Duff is inclined to identify with Jean Huvin, of Rouen. Four other plates are devoted to illustrate the types employed by foreign printers for the books wholly or mainly in English (as contrasted with Latin service-books or grammars) which they printed for the English market. Two of these are assigned to Gerard Leeu, the one showing the type used in his History of Jason (1492), and other story-books, the other that of the Chronicle of England (1493). The other foreign types illustrated are those used by Wolfgang Hopyl, in Paris (1495) • by James Ravynell, at Rouen (1495); and by M. Monn, also of Rouen (1497), for printing three editions of the same work the Liber Festivalis, a collection of popular sermons for saints' days. We have thus left for the illustration of the types used by English printers during the fifteenth century thirty-four plates, containing forty- Ruord of Bibliography and Library Literature. 221 eight reproductions. The total number of types used during this period appears to have been forty-two, the odd half-dozen examples being- inserted in order to, show interesting combinations of one type with another. Of the forty-two types Caxton claims no less than ten. When Mr. Blades wrote his great work be was content to assign him two less than this, that is six types and two sub-varieties, but the appearance of the small type used in the Indulgence of 1489, in the side notes to the edition of the Speculum Vite Christi, printed by Wynkyn de Worde, who inherited Caxton's founts, confirms beyond dispute Mr. Bradshaw's assign- ment of the 1489 Indulgence type to Caxton ; and Mr. Blades also over- looked Caxton's possession of a French type, almost identical with that Downloaded from used by Maynyal in his Sarum Missal, and which Caxton employed in his editions of the Liber Feslivalis, Fiftttn Oes, and Ars Moritndi. Taking over, as he did, five of his old master's founts, Wynkyn de Worde found it necessary to add to them no more than the same number for the books he printed before 1501. The second of these four types he obtained from Gottfried van Os, probably at the time when the latter was

removing from Gouda to Copenhagen, the three others are French in http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ their appearance, the first of them being used in the Liber Festivalis of 1493, and thenceforward for about ten years, while the third and fourth were imported in 1499, and used chiefly for the text and commentary of grammar books. Julian Notary and his partners used only two types- in those of their books which are now known; but Herbert records a 32mo Hora ad usum Sarum, printed at Westminster by Notary alone, and finished on April 2nd, 1500, which, as the page of letterpress only measured an inch by an inch and a half, must presumably have been printed in a smaller type. Mr. Duff" is usually a very clear writer, but after careful study of" his account of the types of Lettou and Machlinia, we are still in some doubt as to their numeration. In his Early Printed Bocks, Mr. Duff wrote of Lettou : "His type, which bears no resemblance at Stockholms Universitet on July 15, 2015 to any other used in England, is very similar to that of Matthias Moravus, the Naples printer; so similar, indeed, as to make it certain that there must have been some connexion between the two printers, 01 some common origin for their types." He is now inclined to identify Lettou with "the Johannes Bremer alias Bulle, who is mentioned by Hain as having printed two books at Rome in 1478 and 1479." "The type," he proceeds, "which this printer used is identical (with the exception of one of die capital letters) with that used in the books printed, by John Lettou in London. The lower-case letters and abbreviations are identical, the number of lines to the page agree. If the two printers are not one and the same, there is no doubt that Lettou obtained his- type from the Roman printer." The type here referred to is the small one used by Lettou in the Walltnsis super Psalttrium of 1481, which contains also a small quantity of a much larger type, numbered by Mr. Duff, in his " List," as Lettou No. 2. This larger type appears, again, in small quantities, in the Littleton's Tenores, printed by Lettou and Machlinia, about 1482. The type in which the body of the book is printed, Mr. Duff marks in his list as " Lettou and Machlinia," and we do not think that he ever reckons it as a Machlinia type. When, however, we come to Machlinia, we find his books divided into two groups, one consisting of either nine (p. 13) or eight (p. 14) works,1

1 The tame uncertainty teems to have been in Mr. Duff's mind in his Early PrinUd Bocks (pp. 161-103), where be speaks of Machlinia as printing by him- self "at least twenty-rtw books or editions," proceeding immediately afterwards to speak of one group of nine " in the Fleet-brigge type," and another of at leastfeurtttn "in the Holbom type." Tht Library. -the other of fourteen, two types appearing in each group, t>., four in aD. When we turn to the " List5* we find Machlinia credited with five types, and in the descriptions of the plates there is mention in brackets of a type six, which, however, consists only of a few capitals of Lombardic -appearance, found in conjunction with type three. Our problem is, Did Machlinia use five types by himself, or only four ? and if fivej what was the type four, which is apparently unrepresented in the facsimiles ? Plate zuc is devoted to a page from the Sege of Rhodes, " the only English printed book [*.*, of the fifteenth century] which we cannot definitely ascribe to any particular printer." The type, however, appears to be identical with that used by Lettou and Machlinia in conjunction, Downloaded from and it was probably printed by someone into whose bands it had fallen after the severance of their partnership in 1482—not by Machlinia, Mr. Duff seems to think, because he was then providing himself with new founts (though this is hardly a conclusive reason), and not by Lettou, because of the absence of signatures, which he always used, and the inferiority of the workmanship.

Richard Pynson has been variously asserted to have been an http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ apprentice of Caxton, and of Machlinia. Mr. Duff shows good reason against both suppositions. The first was maintained by iAr. Blades, who asserted also that Pynson had used Caxton's device, a misstatement which, as Mr. Duff shows, probably arose from an imperfect copy (now in the British Museum) of his Speculum Vite Christi having been made up with leaves from an edition by Wynkyn de Worde in which Caxton's •device occurs. The apprenticeship to Machlinia rests on Pvnson's use of one of his borders, but this he may have acquired by purchase, and it seems certain that he himself learnt his art at Rouen, where he em- ployed Guillaume le Talleur to print law-books for sale in the English market when Machlinia ceased to produce them, and that on Caxton's •death be set up for himself in London, in rivalry with Wynkyn de Worde. Up to the end of the fifteenth century, he used in all seven different at Stockholms Universitet on July 15, 2015 types, most of them probably imported from France, with the addition of varieties of the letter "w, which bad to be made in England, and therefore stand out notably from the rest of each fount As regards the Oxford Press, Mr. Duff's conclusions agree with those of Mr. Madan. Thus he points out the likeness, or identity, of the first Oxford type with that used by Gerard ten Raem de Bercka, who printed an edition of a Modus Confiiendt, at Cologne, in 1478, and the impossibility of proving that the three Oxford books printed in this type were the work of Theodoric Rood, whose name first occurs in the Ales super /tiros Aristotelis de on/ma printed in types two and three, in 1481. As to Rood's identity with the Theodoricus who printed the Question** Aristottlis de Generatione in 1485, Mr. Duff writes very guardedly, thinking that the resemblance of the type of the Questumes to the Oxford type two has been exaggerated, and does not really amount to more than might be expected between two types, both of Cologne origin. The total number of types used at Oxford during the fifteenth century was seven. The press at St Albans is the only one which remains for notice. Four types were used here in all, one of them being Caxton's type three, and two others more or less modelled on others of our prototypographer. The remaining type, used in the majority of the St Albans books, is described as a " small ragged Gothic, remarkable for the extraordinary number and •character of the abbreviations.0 As we have always said these St Albans types bring up the number used in England during the fifteenth -century to forty-two, a rather remarkable total when we remember that, on a high estimate, the number of books (including indulgences, Sic.) in which they were used did not exceed four hundred. When Mr. Dun Record of Bibliography and Library Literature. 223 brings out the annotated list of these four hundred books, which he is understood to have nearly completed, he will have done as much for the history of our earliest printers as any of his predecessors, as much as Ames or Blades themselves, and this splendid portfolio forms an instal- ment of his work the value of which it would be difficult to over-estimate.

Bookbindings, Old and New. Notes of a Book-lover, with an Account of the Grolier Club, New York, by Brander Matthews. London: George Bell and Sons. 1896. [Gleeson Downloaded from White's Ex-Libris Series.] 8vo., pp. 342.

The first half of Mr. Brander Matthews's book is not of very great importance. The history of bindings with gilt tooling has been told of late years ad nauseam, and Mr. Matthews tells it again, not at first

hand, and with hasty generalisations which can only arise from ignorance. http://library.oxfordjournals.org/ His bowing acquaintance with his subject begins with Grolier, and of the delightful blind-stamped books of the previous four centuries he seems hardly to have heard. Of the striking Veneto-Oriental covers he is equally dumb, and all English work is a blank for him. His letterpress and many of his plates, in fact, are a mere conveyance from the French, and he repeats old blunders (such as that the Grolier binding at the Biblio- theque Nationale " in the style of those of Geoffroy Tory" is unique, when there is a closely similar one at the British Museum) with the utmost lightness of heart Owing so much to French books, he repays his debt with an exaltation of the French workmen to a greater height, even than that claimed for them by their own historians. " In the many historical accounts of the art," he writes, " French and German, British -and American, nearly nine-tenths of the bindings chosen for reproduction at Stockholms Universitet on July 15, 2015 are French ; and, after enjoying these, we are often led to wonder why a misplaced patriotism was blind enough to expose the other tenth to a damaging comparison." Now by far the finest collection of bookbindings ever assembled together in an exhibition was that shown some years ago at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, and in the illustrated catalogue of this -exhibition, with which Mr. Matthews appears to be unacquainted, not only is the preponderance of French work nothing like so great as his statement suggests, but both the Italian and the English and Scotch bindings certainly contribute no insignificant share to the attraction of the volume. When Mr. Matthews breaks away from his' French guides, not only are his illustrations much better printed but his book becomes much more valuable. In Mr. Cobden Sanderson and Mr. William Matthews England and America severally possess at the present day at least one binder who has claims to be admitted to the firstrank , and by his generous eulogy and his pretty illustrations Mr. Matthews does full justice to the work of both. In the second part of his book, which is devoted to the designs on cloth cases and paper wrappers, Mr. Matthews becomes still more interesting. His account of the early commercial bindings (of the sixteenth century) is absolutely inadequate, but this has little to do with his subject, and we welcome with pleasure this first attempt to do justice to the many charming designs on the cheap books of our own day. Mart suo, Mr. Matthews exalts his own countrymen above ours, but where both are so good it is needless to quarrel over which is better. A brief account of the Grolier Club of New York brings to an end a pretty book, quite one half of which is worth reading.