English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton

Valerie Hotchkiss is the head of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and coeditor, with Jaroslav Pelikan, of Creeds and Confessions of Faith in the Christian Tradition. Fred C. Robinson is the Douglas Tracy Smith Professor Emeritus of English and a librarian of the Elizabethan Club at Yale University, and he is the author of The Editing of Old English.

"English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton is a twice-welcome addition to the book lover's shelves. It provides a succinct and clear introduction to the history of printing in English, including such neglected topics as the interaction between printing and language and the religio-political implications of this seminal technological development. And it introduces to a wider audience the riches of two distinguished collections of early English printed materials."--Milton Gatch, author of The Library of Leander van Ess and the Earliest American Collections of Reformation Pamphlets"We should be grateful to Valerie Hotchkiss and Fred C. Robinson for providing a widely accessible but academically rigorous review of probably the most important period of printing in England. Although there is a grand sweep of two hundred years of history, the individual stories are not ignored, and the authors and printers are brought to light with well-chosen biographical details and vignettes. Many of the books in this catalogue are visually simply delicious, and together they provide a feast to anyone who enjoys books and their history."--Stella Butler, Deputy University Librarian and Associate Director of the John Rylands Library, The University of Manchester"Stimulating from start to finish, enjoyable for the diversity of materials and the strong unity of the presentation, this volume reminds one of precisely why we are attracted to these rare books in the first place: they enliven and invigorate, as much as they record and represent, the distant past immediately before our eyes. As a historian of the book and a curator of rare books and manuscripts, I would not consider my own reference library complete without a copy of English in Print from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton."--Earle Havens, author of Commonplace Books: A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century