Explore "The English Provincial Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders to 1557" by E. Gordon Duff on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The next place after Cambridge is Tavistock, where a book was printed in 1525. It was an edition of the _De consolatione philosophie_ of Boethius, translated into verse and divided into eight-line stanzas. In most manuscripts of the poem the author is given as Johannes Capellanus, but at the end of this edition are some verses whose first and last letters give the names of the patroness, Elizabeth Berkeley, and the translator, Johannes Waltwnem or Walton, said to have been a canon of Oseney. The colophon runs: "Enprented in the exempt monastery of Tavestok in Denshyre. By me, Dan Thomas Rychard, monke of the sayd monastery. To the instant desyre of the ryght worshypful esquyer Mayster Robert Langdon, anno d. MDXXV. " It was no doubt produced at the expense of Robert Langdon of Keverell, a rough woodcut of whose arms occurs at the end of the book. He was a wealthy Cornish gentleman, who married an heiress and died in 1548.
The book is printed in a neat and clear black-letter. On the title-page is a woodcut of the Almighty seated in a diamond-shaped panel, the outside angles being filled with symbols of the four evangelists. Copies of this book are not so rare as is generally supposed. There are two in the Bodleian, and one in Exeter College, Oxford. One is in the Rylands Library, another in St Andrews University, while Lord Bute, Mr Christie Miller, and the Duke of Bedford all have examples.