История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 129 стр.

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For about 40 years, England was a profitable field for continental printers and their

agents. This necessary free trade was brought to an end and native stationers

protected under Henry VIII, whose acts of 1523, 1529, and 1534 imposed

regulations on foreign craftsmen and finally prohibited the free importation of

books. It has been estimated that up to 1535 two-thirds of those employed in the

book trade in England were foreigners.

It is thus all the more remarkable that the man who introduced printing to

England was a native, William Caxton. After learning to print at Cologne (1471–

72), Caxton set up a press at Bruges (about 1474), where he had long been

established in business. His first book, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, was

his own translation from the French, and its production was probably the main

reason why this semiretired merchant gentleman took to printing at the age of 50.

He then returned to England through the encouragement of Edward IV and

continued to receive royal patronage under Richard III and Henry VII. Caxton is

important not so much as a printer (he was not a very good one) but because from

the first he published in English instead of Latin and so helped to shape the

language at a time when it was still in flux. Of the 90-odd books he printed, 74

were in English, of which 22 were his own translations. Some, such as the Ordre of

Chyvalry and the Fayttes of Armes, were for the pleasure of his royal patrons; but

his range was wide and included Dictes and Sayenges of the Philosophers (1477;

his first book in England); two editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (the second

undertaken because a better manuscript came to hand); The Fables of Aesop (in his

own translation from the French); Sir Thomas Malory's Kyng Arthur; and his

largest work, The Golden Legend, a compilation of such ecclesiastical lore as lives

of the saints, homilies, and commentaries on church services, a considerable

editorial labour apart from the printing.

Caxton's press was carried on after his death by his assistant, Wynkyn de

Worde of Alsace. In the absence of court connections and also because he was a

shrewd businessman, he relied less on the production of expensive books for the

rich and more on a wide variety of religious books, grammars and other