‘not wreton with penne and ynke’: William Caxton and the effaced technique of the printer

Abstract This article analyzes why the two processes William Caxton mentions most briefly and obscurely in his own writing are those with which he is most easily identified: selling and printing. Caxton’s silence on both the mechanics of the press and his own work as an inventor of typefaces and as a printer of movable type is particularly striking. His paratextual essays treat technology as a means to greater self-care and understanding; his narrative style reveals Caxton as a self-teaching and self-fashioning individual. The press, according to his stylized description, has more internal and social functions than it does practical ones, or, rather, the practical use of the press is only good for its benefits to one’s personal health and psychosocial condition. Early printers’ techniques were at once practical and poetic, visual and verbal, new and borrowed. Caxton’s modern biographers will come to reveal their ability to learn from Caxton a double technique of reproducing his actual type and of writing instructional texts for amateur readers, bibliophiles, and antiquarians. Caxton survives as a relic distributed across the existing volumes he printed.