First edition thus, limited to 210 copies, this no. 75 of 200 bound in cloth, signed by Mark Franklin and Walter J. Partridge on the limitation statement. This handsome reproduction of Chaucer’s Prologue to The Canterbury Tales from Caxton’s 1476 edition is a collaboration of printers and scholars. The ‘distinguished incunabulist [and] authority on Caxton’ Dr Lotte Hellinga provided much help in the book’s preparation (p. 5), the scholar Mark Franklin contributed a preface on Chaucer’s work (pp. 9-16), and the printer Walter Partridge (who had a collection of Victorian printing presses and set up the Perdix Press late in his life), contributed an ‘Introduction’ on Caxton and his edition of The Canterbury Tales.

The volume was printed on watermarked Zerkall mould made paper, and the facsimile pages from Caxton’s The Canterbury Tales are faced by the seminal modern translation originally produced for the 1977 Penguin Classics edition by the literary scholar Nevill Coghill FRSL. The text was set by hand and printed on an Arab platen in Bembo type to align it with the black letter facsimiles, and the text was illustrated with two wood-engravings by the artist and printmaker Howard Phipps, who ‘provided a new wood engraving of Chaucer, after the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery, and an engraving of the Knight seen in splendour outside Wardour Castle’ (p. 5).

This copy is from the library of the late David and Diana Wilson. David Wilson was a printer, friend and collaborator of Graham Williams (the founder of the Florin Press), and collector of private press books.