by Anna Murdoch, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant.

The Department of Typography & Graphic Communications’ teaching sessions always involve a swath of fascinating material from early medical texts to astronomy. One day I was setting up a large volume on some foam rests for students to peruse. Upon opening it up, I saw an endpaper quite unlike anything I had seen before. It had a much softer, lighter appearance than the richer, denser-looking examples found elsewhere within our collections.

The book in which these endpapers reside is Baskerville’s celebrated edition of The Holy Bible. This volume is part of the Overstone Library, a collection which has been held by the university for 99 years, having been bequeathed it by Lady Wantage. She was the daughter of the 1st Baron Overstone, who bought political economist John Ramsay McCulloch’s library after his death in 1864. Being the private library of a gentleman, many of the bindings are very fine. McCulloch, for his part, wrote in his preface to his library’s catalogue that he “acknowledge[d] myself to be an ardent admirer of well-printed handsome volumes […] I also confess to such a folly, if such it be, of being no less an admirer of well-bound than of well-printed books”. It is clear that not all of these bindings were executed during their lifetimes. 

In his introduction to Anne Chambers’ The principal antique patterns of marbled paper, Bernard Middleton relates that marbling began to develop in England in the second half of the eighteenth century, which is the period Baskerville was active in. Diana Patterson relates the tale of his involvement in a competition for a premium offered by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which is now the Royal Society of Arts.

McCulloch describes the volume as being bound in “old red morocco, gilt leaves ; a magnificent book”. Baron Overstone describes it as “Baskerville’s beautiful edition […] old red morocco extra, richly tooled, gilt edges”. In the latter catalogue there is a shelfmark written in pencil in the right hand margin: 11. A, and a note: “Marks. 1930” and additionally “£12 calf”. The shelfmark can be found in the book, but it is crossed out, as the book now sits at Overstone–Shelf 32J/04, and is deemed “Large”.

Both the catalogues and bookplates reveal this was a book Overstone bought from McCulloch. In Contributions towards a dictionary of English book-collectors, James Bonar writes that “the collection is not now traceable”. An inscription on the rear of the endpaper reads: 3/7. 38 453. This could be an acquisition date, or auction lot number. I have not been able to gather any more details on former owners prior to McCulloch.

One has to agree with McCulloch – it is a magnificent book. The binding is unsigned, but not without clues. One, on the exterior, is the leather label with the title on it in gilt. It certainly looks akin to Baskerville’s type. Philip Gaskell, writing of another binding, writes “what links it with Baskerville is the leather label on the spine… apparently with sorts of his own Double Pica roman and italic caps”. Gerry Leonidas, of the Department of Typography and Graphic Communiation, told me that he is not so sure about the lettering seen above as it “looks a bit heavy and with different proportions for the bowls of the B. The E and L have much more curved strokes leading into the serifs.” Another, also on the exterior, is the presence of an acorn tool, which according to Aurelie Martin in “The ‘Baskerville bindings'” is a finishing tool found on some of the 31 volumes she surveyed.

The third clue, when one opens the book, is the endpaper. Gaskell, in his Baskerville bibliography, describes an example of it as “rather striking […] marbled to represent blended washes of water colour”. Intriguingly, if one looks closely, you can see that two pieces of paper have been stuck together before being marbled. Diana Patterson asserts Baskerville did marble at least a ream of paper, which suggests there is more out there to be found.

This certainly is a very exciting discovery for us. Known examples of this marbled paper reside in Birmingham, the British Library, Harvard, and in private collections. 

This is by no means the only example of this marbled paper we hold in our collections, but it is far and away the best. The second is in a rebound copy of Paradise Lost from the Printing Collection which only possesses its front endpaper.

Interestingly, this volume boasts a feature that the Bible doesn’t: marbled edges, revealing how watery Baskerville’s marbling was.

It is much less vibrant than, for example, this volume from the Overstone library:

There are many, many examples of different kinds of endpapers to be found in our rare books collection:

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Sources:

A catalogue of books, the property of the author of the commercial dictionary,  MDCCCLVI, London : [privately printed], 1856.

Bonar, James, ‘John Ramsay McCulloch’, Contributions towards a dictionary of English book- collectors, Bernard Quaritch, 1892-1921.

Catalogue of the library, Overstone Park, [s.l. : s.n.], 1867.

Chambers, Ann, The principal antique patterns of marbled paper, The Cygnet Press, 1984.

Martin, Aurelie, “‘The Baskerville bindings'”, John Baskerville : art and industry of the Enlightenment, Liverpool University Press, 2017, pp. 166-184.

Gaskell, Philip, John Baskerville: a bibliography, 1959.

Patterson, Diana, ‘John Baskerville, Marbler’, The Library, Volume 6-12, Issue 3, 1 September 1990, p. 212–221.

Pearson, David, English bookbinding styles, 1450-1800 : a handbook, London : British Library ; New Castle, Del. : Oak Knoll Press, 2005.

Written by Erika Delbecque, UMASCS Librarian, as part of the 2017 Being Human festival: Lost and Found.

The leaf on my desk was stained, torn in places, and fairly unremarkable. Unlike other loose leaves from the fifteenth century that I had been working on, which mostly contained standard texts that circulated widely at the time, the text proved difficult to identify. My secondary school Latin enabled me to, slowly, make some sense of the heavily abbreviated lines.

I read sentences such as

Feria iij. de sancto Augustino. et memoria sub silencio. de martiribus et de trinitate

On the third weekday, [hold a service] about Saint Augustine. And a remembrance in silence of the saints and the Trinity.

The Caxton leaf that was discovered at the University of Reading (detail)

It became clear that this was a page from a practical book aimed at clergy: an ordinal. Research into the publication history of this type of book led me to a version of the ordinal written by Clement Maydeston, a medieval priest from Middlesex. His text became the standard ordinal in the late fifteenth century.

However, the font and the layout of the text on the leaf did not match any known editions of Maydeston’s work. By chance, I read that an earlier version of the ordinal had been printed by William Caxton in 1477, which survived only in two fragments of eight damaged pages each. These had been discovered in the binding of a book in the library of the Grammar School at St Albans in 1858. Describing the pages, William Blades, the scholar who made the discovery, noted:

The lines are not spaced out to one length. A full page has 22 lines (cited in Wordsworth 1894)

The Caxton leaf that was discovered at the University of Reading

Sure enough, the leaf in my hands had 22 lines, which were not spaced out to one length. Could it be…? The surviving fragments that Blades had discovered, which are now kept at the British Library, are available digitally through Early English Books Online.

The font matched. The layout matched. The page measurements matched.

The unassuming leaf that had been in our collections for almost twenty years turned out to be a unique survivor from a long lost William Caxton book.

Late hym come to Westmonester

Having learned how to print in the Low Countries, Caxton arrived in London to set up the first British printing press about a year before this ordinal was printed. He was a shrewd businessman, seeking out texts to print that would appeal to a large audience. An ordinal would have been a safe bet in Catholic Britain: there was a steady demand for liturgical handbooks from the clergy.

To advertise his ordinal, Caxton printed notices that were pasted on walls and doors in London, in which he urged customers to head to his shop in Westminster to buy the book because it is “wel and truly correct” and “good chepe”. Incidentally, it is oldest surviving printed advertisement in the English language.

Advertisement for Sarum Pie [‘Ordinale ad usum Sarum’] ([Westminster: William Caxton, c.1476-7]) ©Bodleian Libraries

A perilous journey

What happened between the time when the freshly printed leaf left Caxton’s presses and the moment it was discovered in our collections over 500 years later? The leaf contains clues that offer tantalising glimpses into the journey it made before it ended up on our shelves.

Detail of the Caxton leaf showing the red paraph marks

The first of these are the red marks on the page, so-called “paraph marks” which indicate the start of new sections. Unlike the letters on the page these were not printed, but added by hand. Books from the fifteenth century were modelled on medieval manuscripts, and specialised scribes called “rubricators” would add page numbers and paraph marks in coloured ink. Although it was common for customers to take their printed book to a rubricator themselves, evidence from surviving books printed by Caxton suggests that he employed in-house rubricators in his workshop (Tokunaga, 2012). Their work would have turned our book into a finished product, ready to be sold in Caxton’s shop at the “almonesrye  at the reed pale” in Westminster.

Detail of the Caxton leaf showing the offsets from a leather binding

At some point in the following centuries, its fortunes changed. The Reformation, which raged across Britain and the rest of Europe in the sixteenth century, eliminated the need for Catholic ordinals. Dark offsets from leather towards the edges of the leaf hint at what happened next: the leaf was folded and used to reinforce the cover of a later book. Rather than wasting new paper, which was a relatively expensive commodity at the time, bookbinders often recycled leaves from earlier documents for this purpose. So, we largely owe the survival of the Caxton leaf to the thriftiness of these craftsmen!

Portrait of William Caxton from a proof illustration to John Johnson’s ‘Typographia or the Printers Instructor’. 1824 ©British Museum

What happened next is shrouded in mystery. At one point, someone must have taken the leaf out of the binding, although it is unlikely that they realised its significance. The leaf may have changed hands several times, until the late typographer John Lewis purchased it as part of a collection of loose early printed leaves in the 1950s. Lewis suggests that these leaves may have slumbered in bindings of rare books at Cambridge University Library, until they were removed by a diligent sticky-fingered librarian:

A dozen years or so ago, I bought from a bookseller in Ipswich, Suffolk, an album compiled about the year 1820 by a Dr Lodge, sometime librarian to the University Library at Cambridge. […] As librarian to a great library, Dr Lodge’s opportunities for collecting pages from damaged books and packings from broken bindings were extensive (1990, pp. 9-10).

In this way, unbeknown to Lewis himself, a unique Caxton leaf made its way into his collection of historical examples of printing and graphic design. In 1997, this collection was purchased by the University of Reading, where it would sit on the shelves awaiting detailed cataloguing for the next twenty years.

Libraries within libraries

We will probably never know what detours and stops our Caxton leaf made on its five-century long journey from London to Reading via Cambridge and Ipswich. When I identified the leaf as an early example of Caxton’s printing, I realised that what I held in my hands was a unique witness of the introduction of what is perhaps the most significant invention of the modern age. This small, humble leaf has now assumed its rightful place amongst the treasures of our collection. Who knows what other treasures are lurking hidden in bindings on library shelves, libraries within libraries waiting to be discovered?

References

Lewis, John 1990, Printed Ephemera. 2^nd ed, Woodbridge: Antique collectors’ club.

Wordsworth, Christopher (ed.) 1894, The Tracts of Clement Maydeston: With the Remains of Caxton’s Ordinale, London: Harrison and Sons, 1894.

Tokunaga, Satako 2012, Rubrication in Caxton’s early English books, c.1476–1478. Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, 15.1 59-78.