Pen worn, hand weary and eye dimmed from transcribing text after text for the Continental book market, the adoption of the new process of book printing by the 15th-century Kentish merchant William Caxton was as swift as it was successful.
Similarly fed up with the drudge of translating the classical texts which were the mainstay of the European publishing industry, Caxton’s relocation from Bruge to “The Almonry” at Westminster was marked by an entrepreneurial perspicacity in his choice of popular stories, chivalric romances, the Golden Legend and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales that has sealed his legacy as one of the top 100 Greatest Britons.
