theory that the book came from the press of Colard Mansion.

The second edition is undoubtedly the work of our first English printer.
"Explicit per Caxton" is the unambiguous statement of the colophon. It
is a much more advanced specimen of typography than the first edition.
It has signatures, of which _a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i,_ are
quaternions, _k_ and _l_ are terternions, making in all eighty-four
leaves, of which the first is blank. There is no title-page, and the
type used is that which Mr. Blades reckons as No. 2*. The lines are
spaced out to an even length. There are twenty-nine lines to a full
page, and the full line measures 4-7/8 inches. The prologue begins on _a
ij_., and the table of chapters begins on the next page. The text begins
on the recto of _a iii_. The text ends on the recto of _l_ 6, the last
page being blank. There are sixteen woodcuts in the volume, which are
used twenty-four times. There has been some diversity of opinion as to
the year in which this "Game of the Chesse" came from the press of
Caxton. The book is not dated. Dibdin thought it one of the printer's
earliest efforts. Figgins regarded it as the earliest issue of the
Westminster press, and further believed that it was printed from cut
metal types. This is not the view of Mr. Blades, who says: "An
examination of the work, however, with a typographical eye does not
afford a single evidence of very early workmanship. All Caxton's early
books were uneven in the length of their lines--this is quite even. Not
one of the early works had any signatures--this is signed throughout.
These two features alone are quite sufficient to fix its date of
impression at least as late as 1480, when Caxton first began the use of
signatures; but when we find that every known copy of this edition of
the 'Chess-Book' presents a thicker and more worn appearance than any
one copy of any other book, there is good reason for supposing that this
may have followed the 'Tulli' of 1481, and have been the last book for