A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898 | Page 6

known as No. 3, with which he sometimes used a set of Lombardic capitals. With this he printed, between 1487 and 1489, several important books, among them the Royal Book, a folio of 162 leaves, illustrated with six small illustrations, the Book of Good Manners, the first edition of the Directorium Sacerdotum, and the Speculum Vit? Christi. During 1487 also he had printed for him at Paris an edition of the Sarum Missal, from the press of George Maynyal, the first book in which he used his well-known device. The second edition of the Golden Legend is believed to have been published in 1488, and to about the same time belongs the Indulgence which Henry Bradshaw discovered in the University Library, Cambridge, and which seems to have been struck off in a hurry on the nearest piece of blank paper, which happened to be the last page of a copy of the Colloquium peccatoris et Crucifixi J. C., printed at Antwerp. This was not the only remarkable find which that master of the art of bibliography made in connection with Caxton. On a waste sheet of a copy of the Fifteen Oes, he noticed what appeared to be a set off of another book, and on closer inspection this turned out to be a page of a Book of Hours, of which no copy has ever been found. It appeared to have been printed in type 5, was surrounded by borders, and was no doubt the edition which Wynkyn de Worde reprinted in 1494.
In 1489 Caxton began to use another type known as No. 6, cast from the matrices of No. 2 and 2*, but a shade smaller, and easily distinguishable by the lowercase 'w,' which is entirely different in character from that used in the earlier fount. With this he printed on the 14th July 1489, the Faytts of Armes and Chivalry, and between that date and the day of his death three romances, the Foure Sons of Aymon, Blanchardin, and Eneydos; the second editions of Reynard the Fox, the Book of Courtesy, the Mirror of the World, and the Directorium Sacerdotum, and the third edition of the Dictes and Sayinges. To the same period belong the editions of the Art and Craft to Know Well to Die, the Ars Moriendi, and the Vitas Patrum.
But in addition to type 6, which Blades believed to be the last used by Caxton, there is evidence of his having possessed two other founts during the latter part of his life. With one of them, type No. 7 (see E. G. Duff, Early English Printing), somewhat resembling types Nos. 3 and 5, he printed two editions of the Indulgence of Johannes de Gigliis in 1489, and it was also used for the sidenotes to the Speculum Vit? Christi, printed in 1494 by Wynkyn de Worde. Type No. 8 was also a black letter of the same character, smaller than No. 3, and distinguished from any other of Caxton's founts by the short, rounded, and tailless letter 'y' and the set of capitals with dots. He used it in the Liber Festivalis, the Ars Moriendi, and the Fifteen Oes, his only extant book printed with borders, and it was afterwards used by Wynkyn de Worde.
Caxton died in the year 1491, after a long, busy, and useful life. His record is indeed a noble one. After spending the greater part of his life in following the trade to which he was apprenticed, with all its active and onerous duties, he, at the time of life when most men begin to think of rest and quiet, set to work to learn the art of printing books. Nor was he content with this, but he devoted all the time that he could spare to editing and translating for his press, and according to Wynkyn de Worde it was 'at the laste daye of his lyff' that he finished the version of the Lives of the Fathers, which De Worde issued in 1495. His work as an editor and translator shows him to have been a man of extensive reading, fairly acquainted with the French and Dutch languages, and to have possessed not only an earnest purpose, but with it a quiet sense of humour, that crops up like ore in a vein of rock in many of his prologues.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.--From Caxton's 'Fifteen Oes.' (Type 6.)]
Of his private life we know nothing, but the 'Mawde Caxston' who figures in the churchwarden's accounts of St. Margaret's is generally believed to have been his wife. His will has not yet been discovered, though it very likely exists among the uncalendared documents at Westminster Abbey, from which Mr. Scott has already gleaned a few records relating to him, though none of biographical interest. We know, however, from the parish accounts