The Old Printer and the Modern Press — A Reader’s Guide

A Two-Part Structure: Biography Then Survey

The book’s architecture is announced in the foreword: Part I covers Caxton’s school-days, apprenticeship, mercantile pursuits, and his role as translator and printer at the Court of Burgundy. Part II leaps forward to the imperfect civilisation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, examining reading habits during the Civil Wars and after the Restoration. The shift from a focused biography to a wide-ranging history of the press is abrupt, but Knight uses it to contrast the scarcity of books before printing with the flood of pamphlets and novels that followed. He quotes Ben Jonson and Robert Burton to illustrate the low taste of both the multitude and the gentry, and notes that even the “pamphlet of news” became a prodigious ingredient in popular literature.

Recurring Images: The Coarsest Intellectual Food

Knight repeatedly describes readers as swallowing “the coarsest intellectual food with greediness.” This metaphor of hunger and digestion appears in his account of the rich upper classes before the Civil War, who “looked chiefly to excitement and amusement in books.” He extends the image to cheap translations of Bandello and Boccaccio, which he calls “rubbish spun over and over again.” The metaphor is not merely decorative; it ties the demand for printed matter to a bodily appetite that printing both satisfies and stimulates. Later, he refers to the “queer cauldron of popular literature” into which the pamphlet of news was thrown, suggesting a boiling, mixed, and often indigestible mass.

Movement Between Scenes: From Court to Street

The narrative moves fluidly between settings: Caxton at the ducal court of Burgundy, the mercer’s shop in London, the printing house at Westminster, and the chaotic pamphlet stalls of Civil War London. Knight uses these shifts to show how printing changed the geography of knowledge. In the earlier period, books were locked in libraries or owned by the great; after printing, they appear in the streets, in the hands of apprentices and gallants. He notes that the first London catalogue of 1680 marks a new commercial order, and that the canvassing system for subscription books brought the press directly to provincial readers. Each scene is anchored by a specific detail—a merchant’s mark, a statue of Gutenberg, a ten-pound fee to read a pamphlet.

Evidence from Quotations and Anecdotes

Knight supports his arguments with quoted voices from the past. He reproduces Ben Jonson’s complaint about “the beast the multitude” and Burton’s lament that gentry “neglect and contemn so great a treasure” as libraries. He also cites Sir Henry Wotton, who quotes a Frenchman saying his country was “much the worse by old men studying the venom of policy, and young men reading the dregs of fancy.” These quotations are not mere decoration; they serve as evidence of contemporary attitudes toward reading. Knight also includes a striking anecdote: King Charles I gave ten pounds for the liberty to read a pamphlet at the owner’s house in St. Paul’s Churchyard. Such details ground the history in lived experience.

Readers should approach this volume as two linked but distinct works. The first part is a straightforward biography of Caxton, grounded in the material conditions of book production. The second part is a more argumentative survey of the press’s social effects, where Knight’s own role as a publisher of cheap literature colours his judgments. The book is richest when it lets its sources speak—the voices of Jonson, Burton, and Wotton give texture to the story of how printing changed what and how people read.

Knight’s old printer would recognize the same quiet thrill I felt turning pages in A Catalogue of Books in English Later than 1700, Vol. 1 Forming a portion of the library of Robert Hoe — Themes and Context—that sense of hands having passed a book along, each leaving a faint mark, much like the press itself left its inked impression on every era it touched.