Caxton

English

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Caxton

Wikipedia

Caxton

A surname.
(printing) A kind of printing-type in imitation of William Caxton's.
A village and civil parish in South Cambridgeshire district, Cambridgeshire, England (OS grid ref TL3058).

Caxton (plural Caxtons)

Any book printed by William Caxton, the first English printer.
- 1880, William Blades, The Enemies of Books, page 37:
  I recall vividly a bright summer morning, many years ago, when, in search of Caxtons, I entered the inner quadrangle of a certain wealthy College in one of our learned Universities.
- 2011, Seymour De Ricci, English Collectors of Books and Manuscripts (1530-1930), page 43:
  This remarkable passion of the British nobility for editiones principes and Caxtons seems to have lasted but a couple of decades.

Possibly from Caxton, Cambridgeshire, from Old English Caustone (Domesday Book, 1086), from Cah (name of an Anglo-Saxon settler), Kakkr (Scandinavian personal name), or ker (“umbelliferous plants”) + tūn.^[1]

Caxton

a surname, equivalent to English Caxton
- 1477, William Caxton, “Et sic est finis”, in The Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres, Westminster, London: William Caxton, folio 74, recto:
  Here endeth the book named the dictes or sayengis of the philosophres enprynted. by me william Caxton at westmestre the yere of our lord .M.CCCC.Lxx vij.
  (please add an English translation of this quotation)

^ George D. Painter (1976) William Caxton: A Biography, New York, N.Y.: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, published 1977:
There is a Caxton in Cambridgeshire, near a crossway on the Roman road of Ermine Street nine miles west of Cambridge, where to this day one of the last gibbets in England looms squat and weather-blackened, once a good pull-up for highwaymen. The derivation seems uncertain, but the name and spelling fit our man, and have led some enquirers to favour this Cambridgeshire village as the starting-point of the Printer’s stock. […] Working from the later, twelfth-century forms Kachestone, Cakeston, the great etymologist Skeat suggested an original Cahestun, meaning the farm of an Anglosaxon settler named Cah; but the equally great Ekwall preferred a derivation from the Scandinavian personal name Kakkr (with which the chief present-day specialist P. H. Reaney concurs), or else from ker meaning umbelliferous plants.