Conyers Middleton (1683–1750)
A dissertation concerning the origin of printing in England
Cambridge: W. Thurlbourn, 1735

Middleton’s enthusiastic study of the early English printed books in the Library, many of which had newly arrived with George I’s gift, was intended ‘to set right some little Points of History, that had been falsely or negligently treated by our Writers’, primarily the belief (referred to on the title page) that a printer in Oxford had been the first to produce a printed book in England, in 1468. Middleton’s work concluded that the Oxford book was quite simply misdated: ‘I take the Date in question to have been falsified originally by the Printer, either by design or mistake, and an x to have been dropt or omitted in the Age of its Impression.’

Cam.b.735.1, title page