 My name is Adrian Edwards and I am the leader curator of the British Library Exhibition, Writing, Making Your Mark. My favourite item is this, it's William Caxton's first printing of the Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Trawson, and it's the first proper book printed on British soil. So the book itself is undated but we know it was printed in the winter of 1476-77 in Caxton's printing press which was in the grounds of Westminster Abbey. The surprising thing about it is the typeface that you see on this page is not in the style of English handwriting. What Caxton has done is he has bought the printing press and the expert printers, the pressmen, with him from Flanders. So the typeface that you see here, the font you see here, is a copy of the best handwriting that they were using in manuscripts in Flanders. So it's Belgian, the first book printed in England uses Belgian handwriting. So the type that Caxton brought with him from Flanders was designed for printing texts in Latin or French. It wasn't designed for English and English at the time had some characters that were not used in Latin and French. And one of them you can see here looks like a Y with a small E on top. Now that Y isn't a Y at all, it's a Middle English letter, a variant of an Anglo-Saxon letter called Thorn that was used for the sound TH. So that word there is actually the, there's a TH with an E above. But people often thought that letter was a Y and in later publications by Caxton and others it looks more like a Y. And it's the origin of why people tend to say Y as in the oldy curiosity shop. So this is really important in the story of writing because it represents the moment when printing with movable type, this kind of printing finally arrived in Britain some 20 years after the technology was invented by Gutenberg in Germany and even longer after similar technologies were invented in China and Korea.