The English Provincial Printers, Stationers…

After an interval of about thirty years the Oxford press restarted on a brief career, this time apparently with the official sanction of the University. The first book issued was a commentary by W. Burley _Super libros posteriorum Aristotelis_. It is a small tract of ten leaves, and was finished on December 4, 1517. The printer, John Scolar, lived in St John's Street, near Merton College. Nothing is known of him before he appears at Oxford as a printer, and nothing of his career in the University. Mr Madan remarks, "Although Scolar uses the arms of the University (their earliest occurrence in print), yet the registers of the University almost ignore the fact that for the second time the greatest literary invention since speech and writing were known was silently at work in its midst. " The expression "almost ignore" is rather disingenuous. Whether the registers did or did not ignore John Scolar we shall never know, since the volume covering the years from 1515 to 1526 is lost.

The text and notes of this volume are printed in two sizes of black-letter type, apparently identical with that used by Wynkyn de Worde. Some of the initials and the woodcut at the end are certainly his, and it would appear as though Scolar had obtained from him the type which had been used for printing the work of Sirectus, published a year or two earlier at Oxford by Jacobi.