Correspondence

To the Editor of The Library Sir, I should like to add a little information to Travis D. Williams’ interesting article on ‘The Earliest English Printed Arithmetic Books’ (The Library, VII, 13 (2012), 164–84). In his commentary on the 1537 and 1539 versions of An Introduction for to Learn to Reckon with the Pen (STC 14117.7 and 14118), Williams cannot be blamed for the errors in the long-outdated guesses on which both he and his more recent sources have had to rely. The book-trade careers of the printer John Herford, the abbot Richard Stevenage/Bourman, and his brother Nicholas Bourman (a Merchant Taylor quite distinct from the name sake freed as a Stationer in 1547 and listed 27th in the charter) are revised in some detail in my book, The Stationers’ Company and the Printers of London, 1501–1557 (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press, 2013–14), so the evidence for the following statements need not take up space here. Having been born somewhere in the emperor’s dominions hardly proves Herford ‘a Flemming’ [sic], and his earliest work was printed at the request of Robert Catton (the abbot before Stevenage). There is no reason to suppose that Richard Bourman was ever associated with Herford’s press in London, whither it must have migrated before the monastery was dissolved in Nov ember 1539. Only two of its books of that year (one extant, one lost) can plausibly be assigned to St Albans, but it produced six dated ones (and probably an undated seventh) in the capital before the end of the year. Sixteen books printed in London in 1539–42 can be identified as products of that press, only six of which bear the name of Nicholas Bourman. STC tentatively attributes two of the remaining ten to Bourman, offers no attribu tion for a third —and misattributes the other seven (two each to Henry Pepwell and Richard Bankes; three to Thomas Raynald). And while the evidence for Herford rather than Bourman as the actual master printer in those years is rightly described by Williams as ‘substan tial’, the record from the Court of Exchequer seems more than merely ‘circumstantial’.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.