FIRST - Printing Press in Fleet Street - Stationers' Hall Court, London, UK
N 51° 30.857 W 000° 06.088
30U E 701112 N 5711001
This plaque, placed by the Wynkyn de Worde Society, is located on the west side of the Stationers' Hall courtyard. The courtyard is entered through an alley on the north east side of Ludgate Hill next to St Martin-within-Ludgate church.
Waymark Code: WMNE6B
Location: London, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 02/26/2015
Views: 4
The plaque is located in the Stationers' Hall courtyard and is inscribed:
Wynkyn de Worde
Father of Fleet Street
first set up his press
by Shoe Lane
near this Hall
circa 1500
The word "near" is relative as Shoe Lane lies approximately 350 metres west of the plaque location close to St Bride's church in Fleet Street.
The St Bride's website tells us:
In the early 1470s, William Caxton had learnt the recently-invented technique of printing in Cologne. He returned to London in 1476 and set up a press by Westminster Abbey. In all, he printed about 100 books, some 20 of which were translated from French or Dutch, on subjects that included history and geography, the lives of saints, fables, and instructional books (for example, on good manners and learning French). His output also included most of the works of Chaucer.
As a well-to-do cloth merchant, Caxton had no need to make his press commercially viable. But after he died in 1491, his apprentice Wynkyn de Worde, who acquired that press, was in different circumstances. Having no other income, printing was his livelihood. So he followed commercial principles and took his goods to the buyer, setting up England's first printing press with moveable type in the churchyard of St Bride's in 1501.
It was a period in history when churchyards were hives of activity, boasting inns, taverns and commercial premises, and Fleet Street proved the perfect place for de Worde's new enterprise.
The publishers of playwrights and poets soon set up competing presses in other local churchyards, and the connection between St Bride's and world of printing and journalism was cemented. Wynkyn de Worde was buried in the church in 1535.
The Weekend Notes website tells us:
Although the national newspapers have all moved their offices out of Fleet Street, it is still a synonym for journalism and publishing. The first daily paper, the Daily Courant, was printed near the now defunct Fleet Bridge in 1702, and in 1500, Wynkyn de Worde located his printing press near the entrance to Shoe Lane. Thus began the association between printing and Fleet Street, a connection that is still maintained in the form of St Brides Church, the journalist's place of prayer. De Worde was buried in St Bride's after his death in 1535.
Wikipedia has an article about Wynkyn de Worde that tells us:
Wynkyn de Worde (also Wynken; originally Jan van Wynkyn) (pronounced: Winkin dee Werd) (died 1534) was a printer and publisher in London known for his work with William Caxton, and is recognized as the first to popularize the products of the printing press in England.
De Worde was born in either Woerden, the Netherlands, or Wœrth in Alsace; the name by which he is generally known means "Wynkyn of Wœrth/Woerden". Traditionally, he was believed to have accompanied Caxton to England in 1476; more recently, it has been argued that de Worde actually arrived c. 1481, and that Caxton brought him to England to counter the competition of a second printer. (John Lettou[3] set up a press in London in 1480.) De Worde improved the quality of Caxton's product; he was, in this view, "England's first typographer". In 1495, following Caxton's death in 1492 and a three-year litigation, de Worde took over Caxton's print shop.
De Worde is generally credited for moving English printing away from its late-medieval beginnings and toward a "modern" model of functioning. Caxton had depended on noble patrons to sustain his enterprise; while de Worde enjoyed the support of patrons too (principally Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII), he shifted his emphasis to the creation of relatively inexpensive books for a commercial audience and the beginnings of a mass market. Where Caxton had used paper imported from the Low Countries, de Worde exploited the product of John Tate, the first English papermaker. De Worde published more than 400 books in over 800 editions (though some are extant only in single copies and many others are extremely rare). His greatest success, in terms of volume, was the Latin grammar of Robert Whittington, which he issued in 155 editions. Religious works dominated his output, in keeping with the tenor of the time; but de Worde also printed volumes ranging from romantic novels to poetry (he published the work of John Skelton and Stephen Hawes), and from children's books to volumes on household practice and animal husbandry. He innovated in the use of illustrations: while only about 20 of Caxton's editions contained woodcuts, 500 of de Worde's editions were illustrated.
He moved his firm from Caxton's location in Westminster to London; he was the first printer to set up a site on Fleet Street (1500), which for centuries became synonymous with printing. He was also the first person to build a book stall in St. Paul's Churchyard, which soon became a centre of the book trade in London. The site of de Worde's press is marked by a plaque on the wall of the hall of the Worshipful Company of Stationers off Ludgate Hill and Ave Maria Lane, near St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
De Worde was the first to use italic type (1528) and Hebrew and Arabic characters (1524) in English books; and his 1495 version of Polychronicon by Ranulf Higdon was the first English work to use movable type to print music.
His name lives on via the Wynkyn de Worde Society, founded in the United Kingdom in 1957 for "people dedicated to excellence in all aspects of printing and the various stages of its creation, production, finishing and dissemination".
