Printers, Stationers and Bookbinders of London and Westminster in the Fifteenth Century

Edward Gordon Duff (1863–1924) was a librarian and bibliographer with a particular interest in the early history of the printed book. This 1899 work examines the fifteenth-century book trade in London – its printers, booksellers and bookbinders – and shows how much it depended on European book importers and craftsmen.

Edward Gordon Duff (1863–1924) was a bibliographer and librarian with a particular interest in early printed books. He was librarian of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, from 1893 to 1900, and Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge in 1899, 1904 and 1911. Alongside research and writing he also did freelance cataloguing. Duff's work set new standards of accuracy in bibliography, which he considered a science. This study of the early London book trade contains the text of Duff's 1899 Sandars Lectures. William Caxton began printing in England in 1476 at Westminster, but most printers and booksellers working in England at that time were foreigners. Duff covers Westminster and London printing separately, and devotes individual chapters to the related trades of bookselling and bookbinding, which were often carried out by the same person. This reissue also contains Duff's lecture English Printing on Vellum, delivered in 1900.