Books by E. Gordon Duff

Based on The Sandars Lectures from 1899 and 1904, this volume provides a historical study of the publishing industry in London. It covers the period from 1476, when Caxton set up his printing press at Westminster, to around 1500, when a series of essential changes took place in the English book-trade, and also from 1501 to 1535, including the 1534 Printing Act.

Originally published in 1912 and based on The Sandars Lectures for 1911, this volume provides a historical study of provincial bookbinding. In a concise yet informative manner, Gordon Duff attempts to re-contextualise the development of provincial printing as a national process, in which a number of different towns were involved.

Edward Gordon Duff (1863-1924) was a librarian and bibliographer specialising in the early history of the printed book. This biographical dictionary, first published in 1905, contains short accounts of the lives of printers, bookbinders and booksellers working in England up to 1557, and remains a standard reference work.

Edward Gordon Duff (1863-1924) was a bibliographer and librarian with a particular interest in early printed books. He was librarian of the John Rylands Library, Manchester, from 1893 to 1900, and Sandars Reader in Bibliography at Cambridge in 1899, 1904 and 1911. Alongside research and writing he also did freelance cataloguing. Duff's work set new standards of accuracy in bibliography, which he considered a science. This study of the early London book trade contains the text of Duff's 1899 Sandars Lectures. William Caxton began printing in England in 1476 at Westminster, but most printers and booksellers working in England at that time were foreigners. Duff covers Westminster and London printing separately, and devotes individual chapters to the related trades of bookselling and bookbinding, which were often carried out by the same person. This reissue also contains Duff's lecture English Printing on Vellum, delivered in 1900.