Forgotten Heroes no 6
Dr Vernon Coleman
William Caxton
(1422-1491)
William Caxton didn’t invent printing from moveable type (that was a German called Joseph Gutenberg who designed an entire manufacturing process which enabled him to produce a completed printed edition of The Bible in Latin 1456) but he can reasonably be credited with having invented publishing as we know it today.
Caxton, who was born in Kent, was a cloth merchant who travelled around Europe on business. It was on one of his trips that he heard of a new process of printing from moveable type. The invention meant that books no longer had to be copied out by hand but could be printed time and time again from the same blocks of type.
Caxton immediately saw the commercial possibility of this invention and in 1474 he set up a press in Bruges where he printed Recuyell of the Historyes of Troyes, the first book in the English language. (It was a long poem which he had himself translated from the original French.) One of his next publications was The Game and Playe of the Chesse.
Two years afterwards he returned to London and opened a print shop near Westminster Abbey in London. The first book he published, and the first book printed in England, was The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, which was printed in 1477.
By the time he died, just fifteen years later, Caxton had published around 100 printed books, including an edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Gower’s Confessio Amantics.
Gutenberg, the man who invented modern printing and from whose ideas are derived many of the inventions and developments which have so influenced our lives, was a poor businessman. Although his invention changed the world he failed to take much advantage of it. He never managed to make money out of printing and he lost his printing equipment to a partner as a result of a lawsuit. He was first and foremost a printer, rather than a publisher.
Caxton’s great achievement was to spot the significance of Gutenberg’s invention and to be the first publisher. He used eight founts of type and began to use woodcut illustrations in 1480. As well as being a printer and publisher, Caxton was also the author or translator of many of the books he produced, and his work contributed enormously to the development of the English prose style.
The twin processes of printing and publishing, as first practised by Caxton, changed the world. During the next century, publishers in England and elsewhere around Europe produced a vast number of books. And those books truly changed the world in every conceivable way. Caxton started that revolution.
The mechanical invention of the printing press was, at first, little more than a novelty. It was Caxton (and those who came after him) who realised that the printing press was going to liberate thinkers and writers everywhere.
It took some time for the craft of printing to develop but, as printers learned their skills, so it became possible to use those skills, and the arts they acquired, to help spread the new ideas, the inventions, the discoveries which were springing up throughout Europe during the Renaissance.
Publishers like Caxton, and those who came after him, enabled inventors, adventurers, authors and artists to spread their work to a far wider audience than had been possible before the printing press was invented. Printing presses helped spread genius far and wide, and far more speedily than would have been possible if the only books available had been those laboriously written out by hand by patient monks.
Caxton, the first publisher, was at the forefront of the Renaissance.
His speciality was (in the jargon of the 20th century media guru Marshall McLuhan) the medium, rather than the message, but nevertheless he truly helped change the world. The printing press was to the 16th century what the invention of the steam locomotive was to the 19th century. But the steam locomotive would not have made much of an impact without railway lines and railway stations. And the printing press would not have changed our lives without publishers and authors.
NOTE
This biography is taken from the book `Vernon Coleman’s English Heroes’ – which contains mini-biographies of 100 of Vernon Coleman’s heroes. Some of the names are well-known but there are a number of surprises. For details of the book please CLICK HERE
COPYRIGHT Vernon Coleman February 2026
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