tc.

The book when printed bore neither place of imprint, date of printing,
or name of printer. The late William Blades, in his _Life of Caxton_
(vol. i. chap. v. pp. 45-61), maintained that this book, and all the
others printed with the same type, were printed at Bruges by Colard
Mansion, and that it was at Bruges, and in conjunction with Mansion,
that Caxton learned the art of printing. His principal reasons for
coming to this conclusion were: (1) That Caxton's stay in Cologne was
only for six months, long enough for him to have finished the
translation of the book, but too short a time in which to have printed
it. (2) That the type in which it was printed was Colard Mansion's. (3)
That the typographical features of the books printed in this type (No.
1) point to their having all of them come from the same printing office.

Caxton's own statement in the epilogue to the third book certainly
appears to mean that during the course of the translation, in order to
fulfil his promise of multiplying copies, he had learned to print. He
might easily have done so in the six months during which he remained in
Cologne, or during his stay in Ghent. That it was in Cologne rather than
elsewhere, is confirmed by the oft-quoted stanza added by Wynkyn de
Worde as a colophon to the English edition of _Bartholomaeus de
proprietatibus rerum_.

'And also of your charyte call to remembraunce
The soule of William Caxton, the first prynter of this boke,
In laten tongue at Coleyn, hymself to avaunce
That every well-disposed man may thereon loke.'

[Illustration: FIG. 2.--Part of Caxton's Preface to the 'Recuyell of the
Histories of Troye.' (Type 1.)]

If any one should have known the true facts of the case it was surely
Caxton's own foreman, who almost certainly came over to England with
him. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that type No. 1 is totally
unlike any type that we know of as used by a Cologne printer, and,
moreover, Caxton's methods of working, and his late adoption of spacing
and signatures, point to his having learnt his art in a school of
printing less advanced than that of Cologne. In the face of the
statements of Caxton himself and Wynkyn de Worde, we seem bound to
believe that Caxton did study printing at Cologne, but the inexpertness
betrayed in his early books proves conclusively that his studies there
did not extend very far. In any case it must have been with the help of
Colard Mansion that he s