Columbians Giant Encyclopedia                     15

paring these with the first printed English edition he found that
these marks correspond to appropriate pages in the printed work.
Further study convinced him that Wynkyn de Worde had used
this very manuscript as his copy when he put the work into type.
The discovery, a remarkable piece of scholarship, was announced
in 1951 in the Transactions of the Bibliographical Society in
London.

Wynkyn de Worde must have borrowed the manuscript from
Sir Henry Willoughby and transported the precious volume to
Westminster. One can only imagine the fear and respect that de
Worde must have instilled in his compositors to keep them from
sullying the pure white of the vellum. Only a single thumb-print
has been found as telltale evidence of a printer's ink-stained hands.

Sir Thomas Chaworth's show-piece takes an honored and im¬
portant place among the few treasured examples of early printers'
copy. Columbia is fortunate in having the two volumes again side
by side. In them can be seen such changes in spelling and punctua¬
tion as de Worde felt he must make to bring the work up to date.
We may see substitution of words current at his time or of words
which seem to him an improvement over the English of John of
Trevisa's day. Likewise we may see practices, and errors, of
fifteenth-century compositors.

Bartholomew the Englishman's The Properties of Things is
about to be put into print again. Professor Mitchner is preparing
copy from the text in the Chaworth-Middleton (Willoughby)-
Plimpton manuscript.