Shakspere
&
Typography
By
William Blades
NEW YORK: Edited & Reprinted
by The Winthrop Press for The
American Type Founders Company
MD CCC XC VII
The INTRODUCTION
n the good old days when printing was better recognized as a mystery thanas an art, one could call a printer ‘a man of letters’ without beingguilty of a pun. Books were for the few then, and the man who would printthem must be somewhat of a scholar himself.
[Pg 4]To-day, amid the whirr of many presses, and the hurrying to and fro of theprinting office, the printer finds little or no time for literarypursuits, despite the fact that printing is, in very truth, the handmaidof literature. It is the more admirable, therefore, when a successfulprinter attains to a degree of scholarship—particularly scholarship inmatters that enlighten and dignify his own handicraft.
Such a printer was William Blades. During[Pg 5] fifty years of activebusiness life he contributed to the history of printing, a goodly numberof books and a mass of miscellaneous articles. Among these is the mostcomplete and authoritative life of Caxton, England’s first printer,representing an immense amount of study and research.
The book from which the following pages are reprinted is perhaps the leastfamiliar of Blades’ works, and it evidently was written as a literaryrecreation. The thought[Pg 6] that reading it may afford recreation to thosebusied about the making of books, and the comparative scarcity of the onlyedition, are the excuses for reprinting the more interesting portion.
The first chapter (merely a resumé of the theories that have been advancedby various professions and callings to claim Shakspere for their own) hasbeen omitted; likewise the appendix, which is a suggestion that many ofthe obscurities in the text of Shakspere may be cleared up by a[Pg 7] study ofthe typographical errors in the first editions. With these exceptions, thework is given here entire, and, it is hoped, in such form as accords withthe spirit of the author, whose tastes were those of the scholarlyprinter.
Editorial Dept.
The Winthrop Press,
32 Lafayette Place, N. Y.
November, 1897
