The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers

Title
The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers
Heading
Caxton in facsimile
Description
The issue of Caxton’s works in facsimile constituted one of the means to commemorate and spread his output for anniversaries. The London printer and bookseller Elliot Stock led the way with The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers in 1877, four hundred years after Caxton first printed the text in Westminster. This was a popular compilation of the sayings of ancient classical, Biblical and legendary philosophers, translated from French into English by Caxton’s patron Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers. The facsimile includes a scholarly introduction by the printer and bibliographer William Blades, who had produced a two-volume study of Caxton sixteen years earlier. It is a clearly celebratory text, Blades commencing his preface with the words: “Four hundred years ago, in the year 1477, a great marvel appeared in England, and many of her proudest nobles and wealthiest citizens wended their way to the Almonry at Westminster to see the small wooden printing press which William Caxton had brought from Bruges … and to gaze in wonder at its almost supernatural productions”.

The facsimile includes reproduction of the red initials and paragraph marks from the manuscript from which it was made and a cover design imitating fifteenth-century binding styles. It claims “minutest accuracy” as a fitting tribute to Caxton. Although the anniversary prompted its timing, the facsimile was ultimately produced for the general reason of all facsimiles, to produce at a reasonable price a text which, if available, would be unaffordable for most pockets – in this instance, a fine copy of the original text was estimated in the 1870s at one thousand pounds. In parallel with the production of facsimiles, the Early English Text Society printed several of Caxton’s translations as scholarly editions in the 1870s and 1880s.

Stock followed up this text with facsimiles of the Game of Chesse (1877) and non-Caxton incunable Boke of St Albans (1881). Three facsimiles from the Scolar Press – Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, The Game of Chess, and The History and Fables of Aesop - marked the quartercentenary in 1976 of Caxton’s introduction of print to England.
Author
Trans. by Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers
Place of Publication
London
Publisher
Elliot Stock
Date of Publication
1877
Format
Folio
Century
19th
Illustrations
n/a