British Letterpress

British Letterpress ☞ Printing Industry

Printing Industry

Print Room at Oliver and Boyd

For many, let­ter­press is an engross­ing sub­ject and while it’s import­ant to do the print­ing, it’s also nice to see how let­ter­press fits in with the wider world and also see the tech­nic­al­it­ies of print­ing.

This sec­tion of the site hosts the ​‘back­ground’ to let­ter­press — I hope you find some­thing inter­est­ing here.

In this section

  • The Oxford Gazette

    The Oxford Gazette

    Britain’s ​‘Jour­nal of Record’ first pub­lished in Oxford, while Charles II fled the plague in Lon­don.

  • Stationers’ Company

    Stationers’ Company

    In com­mon with oth­er Euro­pean coun­tries, Guilds were formed where men had com­mon eco­nom­ic inter­ests and objec­tives and these had dif­fer­ent degrees of con­trol on their trades until the end of the 18th cen­tu­ry, or begin­ning of the indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion. In Lon­don, the May­or and Cham­ber­lain leased sta­tions for trad­ing pur­pos­es around St. Paul’s and…

  • Penrose Annual

    Penrose Annual

    The com­pendi­um that traced the finest print­ing and state of the art since 1895

  • Fleet Street Strikes

    Fleet Street Strikes

    The mid-1980s news­pa­per dis­pute that changed the face of UK news­pa­pers.

  • Times Mobile Printing Unit

    Times Mobile Printing Unit

    How The Times planned to keep print­ing news­pa­pers, even if their Lon­don base was destroyed in nuclear war.

  • Gas Lighting

    Gas Lighting

    There’s evi­dence that gas has been used for light­ing includ­ing in Chi­na in 500BC, with gas trans­port­ed through bam­boo pipes; but here we’re talk­ing about the indus­tri­al age. Our hero in this arti­cle gets only a foot­note men­tion in the Wikipedia arti­cle, hid­den under the name of his employ­er, Sir James Lowther. Mr Carlisle Sped­ding…

  • Stationers’ Company

    Stationers’ Company

    The one-time all-pow­er­ful Guild pro­tect­ing the ​‘mys­tery’ of print­ing in Lon­don

  • Dexion

    Dexion

    Dex­ion is an exam­ple of Slot­ted Angle, described by the BFMP as ​“a post-war devel­op­ment on the prin­ci­ple of the Mec­ca­no unit con­struc­tion but in sizes appro­pri­ate to indus­tri­al appli­ca­tion. It is of ines­timable val­ue to indus­try in gen­er­al and has wide actu­al and poten­tial appli­ca­tion in the print­ing indus­try.”

  • Printers’ Royal Arms

    Printers’ Royal Arms

    Roy­al Arms have always con­ferred an air of author­i­ty on print­ed items and print­ers have sought to use this in their work.

  • Efficiency and the Small Printer

    Efficiency and the Small Printer

    A com­pre­hen­sive look at effi­cien­cy and the small print­er

  • The Printing Industry in 1965

    The Printing Industry in 1965

    A sum­ma­ry of the what the UK’s print­ing indus­try looked like in 1965

  • Organisation of a Printing Office

    Organisation of a Printing Office

    Your dreams have come true! You’re now Gen­er­al Man­ag­er of a print­ing works, but just how should you organ­ise your empire?