Bibliographic record
Abstract
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for to Learn to Reckon with the Pen (STC 14117.7 and 14118), Williams cannot be blamed for the errors in the long-outdated guesses on which both he and his more recent sources have had to rely.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’.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.873 | 0.700 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".