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College and Research Libraries
September 2004, Vol. 65, No. 5
Book Review
James Moran. Wynkyn de Worde, Father of Fleet Street. 3rd. London; New Castle, Del.: The British Library and Oak Knoll Press, in association with the Wynkyn de Worde Society, 2003. 70p. $22.95 (ISBN 1584561041). LC 2003-53595.
This new edition of Moran’s brief 1960 retrospective of the early printer Wynkyn de Worde includes a bibliography of works on de Worde and comes blessed with an appreciative preface by John Dreyfus. Notwithstanding both, it is hard to figure out why yet another edition of this small biography is needed. With its unfortunate title (a teleological double entendre), Moran’s study remains a useful and serviceable guide to the life of the ambitious Flemish printer whom Caxton imported to help launch the black arts in England in the later fifteenth century. But I doubt that there is a recall queue for it at your local college library. So why do we need this, its third instantiation?
Moran was, among other things, a printing historian of a traditional sort. He was interested in output and paper and fonts, in the nuts and bolts of the business of making books. Typography was his forte, and he contributed a series of valuable works on the subject in the 1960s and 1970s. But his oeuvre belongs to an earlier moment in the history of the history of the book, a moment when there really was no "history of the book" in the sense in which we have it today. Although, as John Dreyfus points out in his preface, Febvre and Martin’s L’Apparition du livre (A. Michel) came out in 1958, it took a good twenty years for scholars to assimilate its lessons and approaches to the history of the book. In the meantime, "the history of the book" remained the province of antiquarians, book collectors, curators, and sundry printers—a dedicated band of amateurs who, nonetheless, did much of the basic spade work for later academics.
By contemporary standards, Moran’s review of de Worde’s career seems almost quaint, circumscribed as it is by the narrow horizons of Moran’s own interests and his understanding of his task. It relies heavily on a book I can recommend, H. S. Bennett’s English Books and Readers 1475 to 1557 (Cambridge 1989). For Moran, de Worde was the first printer in London to truly take advantage of the new technology as a medium of popular communication. Over the course of his career, he churned out hundreds of titles aimed at a more popular market and so became, for his biographer, the "precursor" of the Fleet Street baron.
As William Caxton’s "journeyman," de Worde enjoys his own cult following today. There is a Wynkyn de Worde Society in the UK, and it seems to have underwritten some of the costs of the reissue of the present work. Perhaps its members are the driving force behind the volume. However welcome the bibliography by Lotte Hellinga and Mary Erler, though, I cannot really urge anyone to rush out and buy this slim monograph. Librarians and scholars coming to it from the perspective of current work in the history of the book will probably be neither impressed nor enlightened. In its day, it was a welcome addition to the literature. It is good to have it in our libraries. But I find it difficult to make the case for its enduring presence today.—Michael Ryan, University of Pennsylvania.
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