Bibliography

This copy of the Golden Legend, first written in Latin by Jacobus de Voraigne in 1265, is the ninth edition of a William Caxton English translation, printed by Wynkyn de Worde on August 27, 1527, on Fleet Street at “the sygne of the sonne,” according to the book’s colophon in folio CCC.LXXXIIII. The volume is bound in brown leather with embossed gilding and decoration. “NOBILIS IRA” has been stamped on the front cover of the binding as well as the image of a lion—the family motto and crest of Clan Stuart of Bute, a wealthy family of Scottish nobility. It is a heavy and large book, printed at full folio size before trimming. The interiors of the front and rear covers show some water damage.

The spine of the book bears six horizontal hubs. The spine is embossed in gilt with “THE GOLDEN LEGENDE” at its top and “W. DE WORDE. MCCCCCXXVII” in its center with a series of decorative gilt knots embossed in the other recesses between the hubs. The joint and hinge of this cover are in excellent shape, as are most of its pages. The book is accompanied by an undecorated solander case made of cardboard and faux leather, likely of much later origin than the binding and pages of the codex.

The pages of this edition are cloth rag, and they have gilding on all three exterior edges. There is some light dampstaining on the first few pages of the book and the last few. The center pages of the book are in excellent condition and some folios are pristine. Watermarks are visible at the center of most pages throughout the book, bearing the image of a star below an open palm. The blackletter text in which this work was printed has held up very well and the letters are clear and sharp throughout. Unlike earlier printings, this ninth edition does not have red drop cap lettering. Wynkyn de Worde was known for his illustrated copies, and there are many woodcut images stamped throughout this copy of the Golden Legend, some incorporated into the formatting of the text, others taking up full pages (Gillespie & Powell 30). Where the title page would typically be, there is a full-page illustration of many saints gathered around the throne of God. This page appears to have been repaired with newer paper, and one can see where the edges were once tattered by the years.

There are several bookplates glued to the inside of the front cover and to the frontispiece. Inside the front cover a bookseller’s plate is glued to the top left corner reading:

1652 Legend Aurea; That is to say, in English, The Golden Legend; wherein be contained all the High and Great Feasts of Our Lord, the Feats of our Blessed Lady, the Lyves, Passions, and Miracles of many other Saintes, Histories and Acts, black letter, with woodcuts, folio, remarkably fine large copy, Morocco elegant, gilt leaves, EXTREMELY RARE, 52l. 10s. – London by Wynkyn de Worde, 1527. One of the most splendid specimens of this early printer’s productions.

Below this plate it can be seen that a bookplate has been removed at some point in this edition’s life. Below the adhesive residue where the old plate was, there is a bookplate with the image of a fine medieval building. In very small print the facade of the building bears the words ALDENHAM ABBEY. The bookplate glued below this gives a case, shelf, and room number. However, a plate from the Tempsford Hall Library has been glued over the top of it, denoting Case C, Shelf 4, and asking the reader to “Please return this Book to its place when done with.”

Underneath the Tempsford Hall plate is a more modern plate from the twentieth century reading “THE LIBRARY OF DAVID AND LULU BOROWITZ.”

The frontispiece has a fourth bookplate glued to it, this one larger than the rest, decorated with a coat of arms depicting a griffin-plumed helmet resting on the top edge of a shield. The crest’s motto reads “ET CUSTOS ET PUGNAX.” “Ex Libris” is written at the top edge of this plate, and the bottom edge reads: William Marchbank. This plate seems to be of an older paper than the Borowitz plate, but not as old as those of Tempsford Hall and Aldenham Abbey, so it is reasonable to estimate it is from the early twentieth to late nineteenth century. This plate also appears to be glued over the top of another of the same size and inscribed with the same message and crest. All that appears to have changed between the two is the font of William Marchbank’s name at the bottom and the material of the plate itself.

A letter has been glued to the frontispiece of this edition, presumably by a later bookseller. The letter is written in cursive on letterhead from the Bodleian Library at Oxford, dated May 11, 1850. It is accompanied by a loose envelope addressed to Henrietta Street in Covent Garden, London, sent to Thomas Thorpe, a bookseller in the capital. The envelope reads: “Relating the Golden Legende. May 1850” and bears several postal stamps from 1850 while the letter was in transit. The letter reads:

11/5/50

Dear Sir, I have carefully examined our copy (in the Douse Collection) of the Golden Legend, by Wykkyn de Worde 1527. There is no leaf between the Frontispiece and AIJ. Douse considered it perfect, only remarking that the impression from frontis plate was the worse for frequent use. As far as I could keep into the back of the sheet without injuring the Book, it seemed to me that the plate was struck off on the half of the last folding – so as to prove that it was an Ai- I shall be glad at all times to make any search of this nature for you. I am glad to find that your country air has restored you. I wish I could get away from Oxford for a little while, but I am afraid to go too far from my [unknown] Medical friends until the weather has become really genial—besides which I have a great deal on my hands at Bodley at this moment. Believe me. Yours faithfully, M Banchmil.  

Some of the words are difficult to decipher in the cursive text of the letter, but it is apparent that these two booksellers were well acquainted with one another, as Thomas Thorpe is listed in many letters held by the Bodleian Library’s archives in correspondence with the booksellers at Oxford.

There is writing in pencil on the top of the inside cover that may read “Miss lj,” though I cannot make it out too clearly, and this appears to be a part of an inventory code Thomas Thorpe kept with many of the books he sold. The pencil inscription on the top of the frontispiece reads “3500 ww373,” and a final pencil inscription at the top left of the next page bears the call number of the book: BX 4654 J33 1527 to Special Collections, likely placed there when the book joined our archives along with the small stamp at the back of the frontispiece that says, “San Diego State University Library Special Collections.”

Analysis

The pedigree associated with this book is extraordinarily compelling. For much of its near-five-hundred-year existence, we can trace the movements of this edition of the Golden Legend down to the address of its residence and the shelf it has been stored on. The meticulous documentation that accompanies this book suggests to me that it has been an object of great importance since the day it was printed. The letter of sale attached to the frontispiece gives us an insight into how this book was viewed in 1850, and likely through the centuries before and since: as an object of immense value, whether socially or monetarily: a status symbol since the first days following its printing on Fleet Street in 1527 to its ultimate resting place in our Special Collections Library.

Wynkyn de Worde was a student of William Caxton. Born in Germany, he immigrated to England in 1476 in order to work under Caxton, ultimately taking control of Caxton’s business following his death in 1491. Wynkyn de Worde is credited as one of the instrumental early players in London’s printing scene. According to Fleet Street Heritage, he established the first print shop on the now famous Fleet Street in circa 1500 and set out on a prolific career in the industry, “in all, it is estimated that from 1501 to the close of his career [in 1535], Wynkyn printed over six hundred titles, several of which survive today.” He “seems to have sought to develop markets, particularly for smaller, hence cheaper books, that required less capital investment and could be produced more quickly,” though it is clear that this edition of the Golden Legend is not one of those books (Gillespie & Powell 30).

While de Worde made an effort to establish markets for the less affluent, he also had established connections within the hierarchy of the English nobility. He was a close associate of Lady Margaret Beaufort, King Henry VII’s mother, and was even named her printer shortly before her death in 1509. The Companion to the early Printed Book in Britain claims, though it is unclear, that Lady Margaret may have provided some assistance to Wynkyn de Worde, whether through monetary backing, or guaranteed purchases of a set number of copies, or it could be that association with her name provided a boost to sales (Gillespie & Powell 31). In any case, the colophon’s reference to the reign of Henry VIII suggests either that Henry’s reign held a strong grip on British society in 1527 or that de Worde was close with the crown, likely both.

Knowing that Wynkyn was making concerted efforts to lower production costs of his printing, it is easy to understand his movement away from using red ink drop caps in the text, and although it is printed entirely in plain black blackletter, the book is still rendered beautiful by the integrated woodcuts throughout and the masterfully decorated leaf that would have come before the now missing title page. This was very much created as a work of art. Many of Wynkyn de Worde’s printings were smaller, and so the page sizes of this copy of the Golden Legend alone speaks to the importance of this particular edition. A person could not and would likely not have wanted to purchase this book in its day unless they were extremely wealthy.

 And although we do not know who the first owners of the pages of this codex were, we can assume that they would have been deeply religious Catholics, as England was still a decade away from the reformation. This would have been a book of great importance in the owners’ homes, and following the reformation, the stories within telling of the lives of the saints may have been a way for its readers to maintain their catholic heritage.

While the first few pages have been frayed and repaired, a hint as to their usage, the excellent condition the rest of the pages are in and the gilded edges all suggest that this book was moving between the shelves of the rich and powerful before winding up in the Bodleian Library sometime in the first half of the nineteenth century. The Bodleian is one of the foremost institutions of knowledge-keeping in the world. Very little arrives there by accident.

M Banchmil, bookseller at the Bodleian, then sold this copy to Thomas Thorpe, whose bookshop was located at 13 Henrietta Street in Covent Garden, London. Thorpe then, judging by the date of the bookplates and the binding, sold this to a member of Clan Stuart, the book going from Covent Gardens to Aldenham Abbey, near Watford, sometime after May of 1850. The book then traveled further north to Tempsford Hall, a building owned at the time by a Major Dugald Stuart (possibly the original purchaser from Thorpe of this copy of the Golden Legend) just west of Cambridge. Tempsford Hall burned to the ground in 1898, so we know that this copy of the Golden Legend must have been relocated to its new owner’s shelves before then.

It is most likely that this new owner was William Marchbank. Based on the heraldry on Marchbanks’ bookplate, we can see that his family was a part of the Clan Marjoribanks. The Marjoribanks clan is of some relation to Clan Stuart, tracing their joint lineage back to a fourteenth-century marriage between Robert the Bruce’s daughter Marjorie with Walter Stewart, whose son would go on to be the king of Scotland in 1371.

So, we have evidence that this book has been passed along the descendants of Scottish royalty, coming from a birth in the lap of the British royalty. It is likely that the Scots, remaining catholic following Henry VIII’s reformation and the creation of the Anglican church, would have continued to value the Golden Legend spiritually, possibly adding another layer to the clearly cherished nature of this edition.

Whether William Marchbank inherited this book, purchased it from some distant cousin, valued it religiously, or even opened it at all is unknown, but he must have owned the book for long enough to install two bookplates bearing his name and crest on the frontispiece before it went to its new home. Not much can be uncovered about Marchbanks, but this same bookplate appears inside a book at the Penn University archives (call number: EC F6253 650ec), so it can be assumed that he placed much value on his collection. Archival references in letters found at Trinity College in Cambridge suggest that William Marchbank was a knight and solicitor who managed the Drapers’ Fund during the second world war, but this cannot be wholly confirmed by the evidence.

In order for this edition of the Golden Legend to cross the Atlantic and make its way to us, it needed a very wealthy buyer. Enter David and Lulu Borowitz. According to obituaries found in the Chicago Tribune, the husband and wife lived lives of philanthropy and rare book collecting. Lulu spent WWII fundraising for the Red Cross, while David spent the early part of the century investing and founding the Bradley Manufacturing Company, which made lamps and lamp shades. The Borowitzes became a power couple in the book collecting world, donating large collections to Brandeis University and the University of Louisville, where David would be awarded an honorary degree for his contributions. Lulu Borowitz passed in 1987, and with David’s death the following year, this copy of Wynkyn de Worde’s Golden Legend left their shelves. Where it went next is unclear, but eventually the book was acquired by Special Collections, although due to record keeping at the time (or lack thereof), the date of the acquisition and who it was acquired from is not certain.

In a world where there are many old things passed along without record through family members or friends or antique shops, to find an object whose history can be traced at all is a rare feat, let alone one that has had hundreds of years of ownership recorded for posterity’s sake attached to it. When a numismatist picks up a very old coin, they often imagine who might have held it, what it might have been used to purchase. Old books are similar. But in this instance, we can know who turned the Golden Legend’s pages, we can know where they stored it and where they lived, and from that, we can know, in some small way, and with only the tiniest dusting of certainty, a bit about their lives. This tiniest dusting, however, will leave more of history’s traces on our fingers than so many of the things we will ever touch that arrive to us nameless.

To hold an object of this nature changes it from simple antique. The provenance of the piece urges us to view it as artifact; we are holding something that has communed with the past directly in a discoverable way. The book should speak to us of more ancient times, but rather than speaking in a hollow shout, it whispers to us as if confiding a very old secret: “This is what the world was before you came into being.” While it may be a very different world, one bearing the hallmarks of wealth and privilege, whether we are rich or poor now we are interacting with the same interface, turning the same pages, finding the same ink stamped in the same places telling us the same old legends, some of them golden. It is up to us to decide whether this gold bears the same value, or whether it has been tarnished by the hands that held it, be they made rich through blood and scheming—as was the case with Clan Stuart and the Marjoribanks, through a fascination with the word—in all its forms—by those that stewarded the Bodleian and by Thomas Thorpe, or through innovation—as we saw through the rise of Wynkyn de Worde, or through lamps—in the case of the Borowitz family.

While it is hard to ignore the value placed upon these pages that superseded many of the other things that must be valued in this life, for me, this book is still worth its weight in gold.