A Canterbury tale
In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales there gather at the Tabard Inn in Southwark a motley and diverse crew of storytellers. The knight, the squire, the clerk, the priest, the nun and the rumbustious wife of Bath join a host of others to set out for Canterbury on the most famous journey in English literature. The manciple was responsible for buying provisions and food for a monastery, college or inn of court. The reeve was usually a land agent or sometimes a magistrate in a small town. The pardoner sold pardons to those he was persuaded were sinners. And the summoner summoned miscreants to the ecclesiastical courts. As they travel, each tells his or her tale to the assembled company. All had their places in Chaucer’s scheme, all illuminated their age and entrance us even now.
But where was the publisher?
There were plenty of books in Chaucer’s time. They were laboriously handwritten, very expensive, beautiful – unattainable luxuries for most. So no publisher, editor or proofreader appears in the Canterbury Tales.
Printing in the West using moveable type was introduced in Germany by Gutenberg. This was as great a revolution as the internet. Many would say greater. William Caxton, an English merchant from Kent, travelled on the continent and brought printing to Britain. He was a commercial man set on making money and saw that books like the Canterbury Tales and Malory’s Le Morte Darthur would be brilliant cash cows. So he printed and published them with great success.
Bad, brilliant Malory
Malory certainly told a good tale. But he had a flaw or two or three. Le Morte Darthur was written in the Tower of London where he was doing a stretch for plotting against the Crown. But most his crimes were not political: rape, attempted murder, cattle stealing, robbery of monasteries. He led a full life.
Caxton felt that Le Morte Darthur needed a bit of editing before publication to turn it into a blockbuster. So he set to work as a copy-editor. I suspect he went beyond the remit of the average editor! And Malory, banged up in some other jail by then, was hardly in a position to make artistic pleas. So William Caxton was a book editor as well as a printer. And, of course, he employed a small army of early proofreaders.
If he were with us now he’d have found a way to make a billion or two out of the internet, I’m sure. What a tale it would make!