Books in Chains

This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design. This volume brings together vivid studies of William Blades, the printer-scholar whose life was devoted to the craft, history, and evidence of books. A practical bibliographer who wrote only on subjects he knew intimately, Blades emerges as a meticulous investigator of Caxton, early type, specimen books, watermarks, medals, and the origins of printing itself. From the Caxton Exhibition of 1877 and the Plantin Museum at Antwerp to the first presses at Oxford and St. Albans, he combines technical precision with historical imagination, always insisting on nuance, documentation, and honest debate. Alongside these studies runs a rich meditation on book culture: chained libraries in churches and cathedrals, the development of signatures from manuscript practice into print, and the long controversy over the invention of movable type. Blades's essays also range through Shakespearean typographical errors, rare Greek types, the printer "Bercula," and the claim that John Nicholson anticipated the steam press. Quiet, generous, and self-effacing, he appears here as a scholar whose lasting influence rests on steady labor and a lifelong love of the printed word.