Main (Thompson) Library location: Class of '51 Reading Room. William Caxton (c. 1422 - c. 1492) was born in Kent and, by 1438, was apprenticed to a mercer in London. He eventually settled in Bruges, where his business prospered. In 1463, he became Governor of the English Nation of Merchant Adventures, and as such was involved in key trade negotiations. He then became secretary to Margaret of York, the Duchess of Burgundy. She encouraged Caxton's interests in translation and commissioned him to publish his own English translation of Raoul Lefèvre's Recueil des Histoires de Troies. In 1471, while he was studying printing in Cologne, Caxton finished this translation, and by 1473 he published it with his partner, Colard Mansion, a Flemish printer. Afterward, Caxton returned to England and opened a printing firm in Westminster. There he began to develop his own text font, creating eight typesets by his death circa 1492. In approximately 1476, Caxton printed an undated edition of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales – the first printed book in England. Among his 103 known publications are The Dictes and Sayinges of the Philosophers, The Golden Legend, and The Chronicles of England. Caxton developed his printer's mark relatively late in his career; the device did not appear until 1487, when he published a liturgical missal - Missale Sarum - in Paris with Guillaume Maynyal. His relatively large device is composed of his initials, W.C., in script flanking an interlaced symbol of indeterminable meaning. Some scholars believe it to be stylized Arabic numerals representing the year 1474, significant for the circulation of his early publications. Others find this claim unlikely, and instead consider the figure to be a mercer's trademark. In some variations, the lowercase letters s.c. appear on either side of the monogram. These could represent "Sancta Colonia" (Cologne) or sigillum caxtoni, his personal seal. The mark in the Vassar library, however, only contains the c. After Caxton's death in 1491, his successor Wynkyn de Worde modified the mark to use as his own.