Beschreibung:

MYRROUR OF THE WORLDE. [Westminster:] William Caxton [1490]. Chancery 2° (259 x 175mm). Collation: a-l 8 (a1r chapter headings, a3r prologue, a4v text, l8r blank, l8v printer's device). 81 (of 88, lacking a2, d8, f1,7, k8, l7,8, text supplied in 18th-century MS.) leaves. 31 lines. Type 6:121B. One woodcut initial W, 11 woodcut scenes and 26 diagrams. (Some light soiling, small wormholes affecting a few letters, first leaf rehinged, extreme lower corner of a4 cut away.) 18th-century calf over pastepaper boards, red morocco spine, gilt, (sides rubbed), marbled endpapers. Provenance : many contemporary annotations in English; Richard Appleby, 16th-century signature; Reynold Swainston, 16th-century signature; A. Gifford, engraved bookplate, name stamped at foot of spine; William Herbert, 1780; John Peckham, 1799. SECOND EDITION. Caxton translated this manual of popular science from a later prose version of the Image du Monde by Gossouin de Metz, finishing it in early 1481. He printed the first edition that year at the request and expense of Hugh Bryce, alderman, for Bryce's superior, William, Lord Hastings, both of whom were known to Caxton from his time at Bruges as Governor of the English Nation. The first edition was the FIRST ILLUSTRATED BOOK PRINTED IN ENGLAND, and those woodcuts were used again in this second edition with two substitutions. One woodcut was replaced by one from Caxton's edition of Bonaventure, Speculum vitae Christi , and the diagram representing a T-O map consists of 3, not 2, concentric circles. Whereas the map in all copies of the first edition seems to have been completed in Caxton's workshop with manuscript captions, the captions in copies of the second edition are not in a uniform hand and sometimes, as in this copy, do not appear at all (see Campbell, Earliest Printed Maps , no.69). This is one of three copies owned by A. Gifford. One, DeRicci 95.7, he perfected and bequeathed to Baptist College, Bristol, in 1784, and the other (DeRicci 95.10), which he used to perfect the first, is in the Hunterian collection at Glasgow. The Bute copy was also formerly owned by William Herbert, who used his fine collection of early English printing for his continuation of Ames's Typographical Antiquities , a work which, with continuations by Dibdin as well, "brought into clear focus the picture of Caxton as the enterprising merchant who introduced printing into England" (Hellinga, Caxton in Focus , p.28). Goff M-884; Klebs 531.2; Duff 402; STC 24763; DeR(C) 95.15