Rare Finds - A Guide to Rare Book Collecting

“Without such characters, there would be less life in literature, and less literature in life” - Harold Bloom.

In 1478, William Caxton, the first English printer, published Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Five years later he printed his second edition from a superior manuscript, and additionally embellished the work with 26 wonderful woodcut illustrations, one for each character. After publication Caxton did not destroy the carved wooden blocks that he had commissioned; rather, they were passed down and sold to subsequent editors, finally coming into the possession of London tailor and antiquarian John Stowe, who used 22 of them to illustrate his important edition of 1561, tangibly linking his edition to Caxton’s virtually unobtainable incunables.

Caxton’s woodcuts provide us with iconic images of these pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser studied Stowe’s edition carefully, and Shakespeare was at least familiar with it. William Blake wrote, “every age is a Canterbury Pilgrimage ; we all pass on, each sustaining one of these characters of Chaucer.”

We offer a lovely, complete copy of this splendid 1561 edition, which in addition to the Canterbury Tales includes The Romaunt of the Rose, Troilus and Creseide, Boecius de Consolacione, and The Testament of Love, a folio volume beautifully printed in two columns of gothic text and very handsomely bound by Bedford.