Main (Thompson) Library location: North wing -- Third window. Richard Grafton (c. 1511-1573) was born in Shrewsbury in 1511 and was apprenticed to a grocer in 1526, through whom he became affiliated with the Grocers' Company in London. This involvement did not concern trade as much as it did interactions with evangelical religious thinkers and traders in Antwerp. After 1534, when he left the Grocers' Company, Grafton began to engage with the commercial interests of Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer then commissioned Grafton to work on a new English translation of the Bible; in 1537 Grafton oversaw the printing in Antwerp of an English translation of the bible known as "Matthew's Bible" with Edward Whitchurch. He then collaborated with Whitchurch to produce the "Great Bible" of 1539, which had been printed partly in Paris and partly in England. In 1543, Grafton and Whitchurch received a patent to print service books for the Church, and later to print primers in Latin and English. He printed the first and second Books of Common Prayer in 1549 and 1552. Under Henry VIII, Grafton was appointed royal printer, but after the death of Edward VI lost the position. Grafton then began to compile English Chronicles and to work closely again with the Grocers' Company for the remainder of his career. His most prominent works, apart from bibles, include Injunctions, Statutes and Proclamations of Parliament, and Erasmus' Apophthegmes. Throughout his immense body of work, Richard Grafton employed several variations of his mark. Each contains a consistent monogram: the initials R.G. beneath a four-mark. Grafton then cut an illustration of a "grafted" fruit-tree growing through the center of a "tun," or barrel like those used to transport books, onto which he placed his monogram. This created a rebus, an allusion to words through the visual representation of sounds and syllables. In certain variations, Grafton included scrolls bearing Latin phrases to inform the viewer of his pun. Additionally, angels often flank this unique representation of the printer's name.