Chapter II: Caxton's Press at Bruges

In what city and from what printer Caxton received his earliest training in the art of printing has been a much debated question amongst bibliographers. The only direct assertion on the point is to be found in the lines which form part of the prologue written by Wynkyn de Worde, and added to the translation of the _De proprietatibus rerum_ of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, issued about 1495.

"And also of your charyte call to remembraunce,
The soule of William Caxton, the fyrste prynter of this book,
In Laten tongue at Coleyn, hymself to avaunce,
That every well disposed man may thereon look."

As Wynkyn de Worde was for long associated with Caxton in business and became after his death his successor, it seems impossible to put aside his very plain statement as entirely inaccurate. William Blades, in his _Life of Caxton_, utterly denies the whole story. "Are we to understand," he writes, "that the editio princeps of Bartholomaeus proceeded from Caxton's press, or that he only printed the first Cologne edition? that he issued a translation of his own, which is the only way in which the production of the work could advance him in the Latin tongue? or that he printed in Latin to advance his own interests? The last seems the most probable reading. But though the words will bear many constructions, they are evidently intended to mean that Caxton printed Bartholomaeus at Cologne. Now, this seems to be merely a careless statement of Wynkyn de Worde; for if Caxton did really print Bartholomaeus in that city, it must have been with his own types and presses, as the workmanship of his early volumes proves that he had no connexion with the Cologne printers, whose practices were entirely different."

PLATE I