Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 5.djvu/411

 11 8. V. APKIL 27, 1912.] NOTES AND QUERIES.

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Leighton (Stanley), The Early MSS. belong- ing to Shrewsbury School (Shrop. Arch, and Nat. Hist. Soc., Second Series, ix. 219-308). Boyd (W. K.), Early Deeds relating to Chirbury (Shrop. Arch, and Nat. Hist. Soc., Second Series, x. 203-6).

Vaughan (H. F. J.), Wenlock Corporation Records (Shrop. Arch, and Nat. Hist. Soc., Second Series, vi. 223-83).

' Recent Boscobel Literature,' in Cherrys' ' Historic. Staffordshire.'

A. L. HUMPHREYS. 187, Piccadilly, W.

(To be continmd.)

on

The English Provincial Printers, Stationers, and Bookbinders to 1557. By E. Gordon Duff. (Cambridge University Press.) IN the two series of lectures Mr. Duff delivered at Cambridge as Sanders Reader in 1889 and 1904 he dealt with the printers, stationers, and book- binders of Westminster and London from 1476 to 1535 the period from the introduction of printing into England by Caxton to the death of his successor, Wynkyn de Worde. In the present series he turns to the provincial towns, and traces the history of the printers, stationers, and binders who worked in them from 1478, when printing was introduced into Oxford, up to 1557. Mr. Duff has extended the period to 1557 because in that year a charter was granted to the re-formed Company of Stationers in which there was a clause prohibiting printing by any person not being a member of the Stationers' Company. This virtually put an end to all pro- vincial printing, " and with the exception of a few Dutch books, printed under a special privilege at Norwich between 1550 and 1570, and a doubtful York book of 1579, no printing was done outside London until 15815, when the Uni- versities of Cambridge and Oxford once more started their presses."

The first book from the Oxford Press was the ' Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum,' a treatise by Tyrannius Rufinus on the Apostles' Creed, which was finished on the 17th of December, 1478. By an error of the printer an X was omitted from the figures forming the date in the colophon, and the year was printed as 1468. Mr. Duff gives particulars of the " wonderful legendary story which was woven some two hundred and fifty years ago " round this false date.

" The only other provincial town beside: Oxford which possessed a printing press in the fifteenth century was St. Alban's, where an un- named printer started to work about 1479." The first book was " a small work of Augustinus Datus, usually called ' Super eleganciis Tullianis,' of which the only known copy is in the Cambridge University Library. It is a small quarto oi eighteen leaves, and is printed in a peculiarly delicate Gothic letter." ' The Chronicles of England,' one of the two English books issued by the St. Alban's printer, is undated, but is ascribed to the year 1485. The last book from this press was the famous ' Book of St. Alban's,' which contains the earliest known examples of colour-

printing in England. Mr. Duff has much to tell is of the books printed at York, which was ' from very early times an important centre of
 * >ook production."

The first Cambridge printed work was a speech, of Dr. Henry Bullock, delivered before Wolsey when the Cardinal visited the University in the autumn of 1520 ; and in 1521 a second book appeared, the sermon of Augustine, ' De Miseria ac Brevitate Vitse.' There is a Greek motto on bhe title-page. " This type is interesting as the first genuine moveable Greek type used in Eng- land. " A year or two earlier," Mr. Duff says,

W. de Worde had introduced a few words of Greek into an edition of Whitinton's ' Grammar,'' but the words were roughly cut on wood."

The amount of information the author has 1 crowded into this little volume of 150 pages is wonderful. At the end we find a good index. The illustrations include the colophon and device from Whitinton's ' Grammar,' from the unique copy in the British Museum.

A Ncto English Dictionary : See Senatory r (Vol. VIII.) By Henry Bradley. (Oxford,. Clarendon Press.) WE welcome another instalment of this great work. The most important articles in the section before us are " see," " seek," " self," and " sell." In all it is remarkable how many works of present- day fiction not, we imagine, likely to survive, and how many newspapers and other periodicals, are drawn upon for instances of a kind which might equally easily have been collected from standard writings. The article on " self " is particularly interesting. " Selfish " was intro- duced in the middle of the seventeenth century a word said to be of the Presbyterians' " own new mint " and since then the number of compounds of " self " has been steadily growing, though, even in the previous century, a few had already appeared. Thus " self-assurance " and " self-pleasing " are used by Spenser ; " self-lover," "self-praise," " self-seeking," and "self-trust " are contemporary with him ; while " self-will," in our common sense of the term, goes back to the fifteenth century. For " selfless " the earliest quotation is from Coleridge. The article " sell >r seems to us curiously arranged. After the obso- lete sense " to give, or hand over," we get, not the chief current sense, but " to give up treacher- ously," " to betray," a use which is said to have " a mixture of sense 3." It would surely have been better that is, closer to the nuance of intention in the actual usage of " sell " for " to- betray " if it had been described as an extension,, often metaphorical, of the current sense, and had been ranged under that. The instances given, cannot be said to preclude this.

A certain number of curious words fall within thia volume. " Seer-sucker," lit. " milk and sugar," the corruption of a Persian word, is a thin linen fabric with a puckered surface, origin- ally made in India, and now coming into use in- the United States. " Sempiternum," a seven- teenth-century name for a woollen cloth, suggests afresh the familiar difficulty of finding names for things, and a recklessness, like our own, in the employment of great words for trivial purposes. The last instance of " sele " quoted is, naturally, from Borrow, who uses it fairly often " I gave the man the sele of the day" ; but there is also an early nineteenth-century instance from East