Caxton's editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

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William
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Caxton's editions of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Post by William »

Some readers might like to know of the following.

http://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/homepage.html

There are various pages linked from that page and from some other pages.

In particular the following page, which contains a link to a pdf document.

http://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/caxtoninthebl.html

In regard to the first edition the type size seems to me to me approximately 18 point. I worked that out from the 271 mm height of the page as stated in the http://www.bl.uk/treasures/caxton/description.pdf document and the number of lines of text on the page and the approximate number of lines that could fit into a space the size of the upper and lower margins.

There are 25.4 mm in 1 inch and one inch is 72 points in modern metal type nomenclature. I do not know at present what was the size of an inch in Caxton's time: it might just be that, whatever was the size of an inch at that time, the vertical size of Caxton's type was perhaps one quarter of an inch.

Already I have noticed the use of what appears to be a ch ligature.

William Overington

22 August 2007
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