Other parts of Europe established presses quickly; e.g., Utrecht (1470), Budapest (1473), and Cracow (1474), in each case through Germans. In Spain the German connection is particularly evident. The first Spanish press was set up in 1473 at Valencia, where the German trading company of Ravensburg had an important base. Though Madrid became dominant after 1566, publishing flourished in the early period at Barcelona, Burgos, Zaragoza, Sevilla (Seville), and the university towns of Salamanca and Alcalá de Henares. Spain quickly evolved its own distinctive style of book, full of dignity and printed largely in black-letter types. The most remarkable production of the period was the magnificent Complutensian Polyglot Bible (which presented the text in several languages in adjacent columns), sponsored by Cardinal Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros “to revive the hitherto dormant study of the scriptures,” which it effectively did. It was printed at Alcalá de Henares, in Hebrew, Chaldee, Syriac, Greek, and Latin, by Arnaldo Guillermo de Brocar, the first great Spanish printer. Editorial work was begun in 1502, the six volumes were printed in 1514–17, and the book finally was issued in 1521 or 1522. In Lisbon, the first printed book was a Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) produced in 1489 by Eliezer Toledano; he was reinforced in 1495 by two printers summoned by the Queen of Portugal. From Spain, printing crossed the Atlantic during this early period. In 1539 Juan Cromberger of Sevilla, whose father, Jacob, had set up a press there in 1502, secured the privilege for printing in Mexico and sent over one of his men, Juan Pablos. In that year, Pablos published the first printed book in the New World, Doctrina christiana en la lengua mexicana e castellana (“Christian Doctrine in the Mexican and Castilian Language”). England
Compared with the Continent, England in the early days of printing was somewhat backward. Printing only reached England in 1476, and in 1500 there were still only five printers working in England, all in London and all foreigners. Type seems to have been largely imported from the Continent until about 1567, and paper until about 1589 (except for a brief spell during 1495–98). In an Act of 1484 to restrict aliens engaging in trade in England, Richard III deliberately exempted all aliens connected with the book trade in order to encourage its domestic development. In the following year, Henry VII appointed a foreigner, Peter Actors of Savoy, as royal stationer, with complete freedom to import books. For about 40 years, England was a profitable field for continental printers and their agents. This necessary free trade was brought to an end and native stationers protected under Henry VIII, whose acts of 1523, 1529, and 1534 imposed regulations on foreign craftsmen and finally prohibited the free importation of books. It has been estimated that up to 1535 two-thirds of those employed in the book trade in England were foreigners.
It is thus all the more remarkable that the man who introduced printing to England was a native, William Caxton. After learning to print at Cologne (1471–72), Caxton set up a press at Bruges (about 1474), where he had long been established in business. His first book, The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, was his own translation from the French, and its production was probably the main reason why this semiretired merchant gentleman took to printing at the age of 50. He then returned to England through the encouragement of Edward IV and continued to receive royal patronage under Richard III and Henry VII. Caxton is important not so much as a printer (he was not a very good one) but because from the first he published in English instead of Latin and so helped to shape the language at a time when it was still in flux. Of the 90-odd books he printed, 74 were in English, of which 22 were his own translations. Some, such as the Ordre of Chyvalry and the Fayttes of Armes, were for the pleasure of his royal patrons; but his range was wide and included Dictes and Sayenges of the Philosophers (1477; his first book in England); two editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the second undertaken because a better manuscript came to hand); The Fables of Aesop (in his own translation from the French); Sir Thomas Malory’s Kyng Arthur; and his largest work, The Golden Legend, a compilation of such ecclesiastical lore as lives of the saints, homilies, and commentaries on church services, a considerable editorial labour apart from the printing.
Caxton’s press was carried on after his death by his assistant, Wynkyn de Worde of Alsace. In the absence of court connections and also because he was a shrewd businessman, he relied less on the production of expensive books for the rich and more on a wide variety of religious books, grammars and other schoolbooks, and collections of popular tales. He published more than 700 titles, mostly small volumes for the ordinary citizen, and continued Caxton’s standardizing of the language, a solid contribution to the native book trade. The best of the early printers was Richard Pynson of Normandy, who began printing in 1492 and became printer to the king in 1508. Pynson, the first to use roman type in England (1509), published the first English book on arithmetic (1522). After his early liturgies and some fine illustrated books, he concentrated mainly on legal works. In 1521 he published Henry VIII’s answer to Luther in defense of the papacy, for which the King received the title of fidei defensor (“defender of the faith”) from the Pope. Printed illustrations
Although 15th-century printers characteristically were content to exploit the existing book format, their use of printed illustrations in fact produced a new means of expression. Printers used woodcuts to print illustrations by the relief process and experimented with intaglio in copper engravings. Woodcut pictures were produced before metal types, and it was a simple development to make woodcuts in appropriate dimensions for use with type to print illustrated books. Albrecht Pfister of Bamberg was printing books illustrated with woodcuts about 1461. Copper engravings, which were better able to produce fine lines, were especially suitable for the reproduction of maps; among the few incunabula illustrated with engravings is a Ptolemy Geographia printed at Rome by Arnoldus Buckinck in 1478. But because engravings required a different press and introduced a separate process into printing, and because experiments with woodcut illustrations were so satisfactory, there was no extensive use of engravings before 1550.