To the Tower Born - Robin Maxwell Read Online Free PDF

liked her job. It was one she was not forced to do, for her father was a wealthy man, but did for the pleasure of it. This seemed to Bessie a great blessing. Sometimes she envied Nell for her usefulness in the world. What is a princess useful for, besides the marriage bed and baby making? But no, she would not dwell on such things today.
    As Bessie pushed the shop door open, she anticipated the heavy clanking of the cowbell above her head. It was a bit of a joke, that bell, for most shops had something small and tinkling above their doors to announce customers. But Caxton’s shop with its crashing printing press was such a noisy place that a cowbell had been needed to be heard above the din. This day, to Bessie’s surprise, Caxton’s was blissfully quiet. The bookshop at the front was as silent as her father’s library. Through the archway in the back Bessie could see that the press was still. Jan de Worde, the printer’s brawny-armed apprentice, was carrying a heavy box of type down the steep wooden steps from above.
    The smell in Caxton’s, Bessie thought, was like nothing she had ever known—still-wet inks, papers and vellum, leather, and the oill that lubricated the presses. Nell always said the smell was as natural to her as baking bread to a kitchen maid.
    There was her friend standing with a customer, reverently turning the thick pages of William Caxton’s fourteenth-century illuminated manuscript, Deeds of Alexander the Great. Anyone who came into the shop, themselves no doubt interested in volumes popular, religious, and rare, would be granted a peek at the great book, a gift from Caxton’s old friend Burgundy’s Philip the Good. Everyone marveled at the gem-encrusted cover, the gold leaf and painted illustrations, and letters twined with flowers and vines and mythical beasts. Once a person was gorged with the wonder of that book, Nell would lead them cleverly to the tables and shelves of newer books that were for sale. Some had been imported from the continent, many in French—the language that the educated English read from most often. There were scholarly tomes in Latin and Greek and several in Arabic, the flowing letters of which fascinated Bessie, who wondered how anyone could possibly read them.
    But the true pride of the bookstore were the books printed
    by Nell’s father on his press. Books translated from the French and Greek and Latin to English. It was new, this reading of the printed word in the native tongue. A revelation. A novelty. And Nell’s father had invented it. Not the press, of course. Printing with movable type was thirty years old. Every man of learning had in his personal library a copy of the first book ever printed on Johann Gutenberg’s press—the Bible.
    Bessie marveled to realize that in the six years since Caxton had come from the city of Bruges in Burgundy to set up shop in Westminster precinct, great numbers of his countrymen and women had been learning to write and read English. So customers for the translated works were becoming plentiful, and enthusiasm was growing.
    Add to that a pretty, twenty-year-old girl, brilliantly educated, who listened with the greatest apparent fascination to her customers’ interests and desires, who would point them to just the right volume, and you had the most famous and beloved bookstore in all of England. Sometimes Bessie found it hard to believe that her friend was at the very center of such momen-tousness and influence.
    William Caxton himself was generally too busy to serve book buyers, what with his presses running day and night to turn out a growing number and variety of printed matter. He trusted that the store was in the best of hands with his daughter, the love and light of his life—he a longtime widower with no other children to dote on.
    Nell looked up then and saw her friend. A grin cracked her face wide open, and with a whisper to her customer, she came round the table and indulged with Bessie in an excited and mutual