The Process Year Work Book, was the ini­tial title of the 1895 Pen­rose Annu­al — a series of books that doc­u­ment the state-of-the-art of print­ing; reflect the tastes of the day; and pro­vide a show­case for the best print­ers and famous-name sup­pli­ers. The first Pen­rose I read was daunt­ing — was I real­ly expect­ed to under­stand and have a view on the obscure elec­tron­ic trans­fer of images that allowed news­pa­pers to print pho­tos from far-flung places as well as the way Con­ti­nen­tal books were supe­ri­or to our own offer­ings? In the end I took it as a per­son­al chal­lenge to under­stand more of print­ing by devour­ing these annu­als.

Beginnings: 1895

William Gam­ble of Scar­bor­ough was orig­i­nal­ly a jour­nal­ist work­ing for a coun­try news­pa­per (prob­a­bly in Ipswich) in 1877. He saw that pho­tog­ra­phy and rich illus­tra­tion were the future and set up an in-house plant to work with pho­tog­ra­phy for the news­pa­per. Gam­ble moved to Lon­don in 1886, ini­tial­ly as a jour­nal­ist but then spe­cial­is­ing in mak­ing and sell­ing illus­trat­ed print­ing blocks to small­er local news­pa­pers. Gam­ble met A. W. Pen­rose — a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal chemist of Clerken­well — with whom he dis­cussed the dif­fi­cul­ty in mak­ing this a suc­cess­ful ven­ture.

In 1893 Gam­ble and Pen­rose estab­lished Pen­rose & Co. in Upper Bak­er Street, Lon­don, although the offi­cial his­to­ry of the Pen­rose Annu­al sug­gests this might have also been called Pho­to Process Stores.

From 1893 Gam­ble — mak­ing use of his jour­nal­ist past — start­ed issu­ing a news sheet called Process Work to keep his cus­tomers up-to-date with ​‘the lat­est nov­el­ties and devel­op­ments in process work’.

Process Work is a term to describe print­ing blocks made by mechan­i­cal means. You’ll know tra­di­tion­al print­ing sur­faces had been cast in lead (like type) or cut from wood (like woodlet­ter or Bewick­’s cuts). This ​‘process’ work could include dupli­cates of wood engrav­ings made using elec­trol­y­sis, and oth­er ways of get­ting images to print with the let­ter­press process.

That month­ly sheet became annu­al, and so the 1895 issue of a year book The Process Work Year Book includ­ed 113 pages of Pen­rose & Com­pa­ny’s cat­a­logue in addi­tion to the exam­ples of what was now pos­si­ble with process work. That first edi­tion was print­ed by Lund, Humphries of Brad­ford.

It was the fol­low­ing year that the Annu­al took a sub-title of Pen­rose’s Annu­al, and that is how this mag­nif­i­cent thread of print­ing life was estab­lished.

Editors and Owners

The Annu­al was edit­ed by William Gam­ble from 1895 until 1933 — the year of Gam­ble’s death. The Annu­al was pub­lished by A. W. Pen­rose & Co., Gam­ble’s firm.

In 1909, Lund Humphries bought the pub­li­ca­tion, and became both pub­lish­er and print­er.

It was Richard Bertram Fishen­den (styled R. B. Fishen­den in the Annu­al) at the helm from 1934 to 1957. Fishen­den’s friend, Alan Dela­fons edit­ed between 1958 and 1962.

After a short gap in issue, Her­bert Spencer was edi­tor between 1964 and 1973. The title was sold in 1973 to North­wood Pub­li­ca­tions.

Bryan Smith took over for two issues from 1974, the final edi­tor being Clive Goodacre.

Above — gallery of stud­ies of Pen­rose Annu­al pages, from this Flickr stream shared by Rus­sell Davies under a CC Licence

Impact

For many, the Pen­rose Annu­al bridged the gap between those push­ing the tech­ni­cal bound­aries of print­ing, and those devot­ed to the art of the book and writ­ten word. In the mam­moth issues of the 1950s and 1960s each has a mul­ti­tude of process­es — gravure, let­ter­press, litho — on dif­fer­ent media — cel­lo­phane, newsprint, board and paper — to show off what was pos­si­ble. Tech­ni­cal arti­cles of the time include cov­er­age of pho­topoly­mer (1955) and the abil­i­ty to trans­fer pho­tos through scan­ning and data trans­fer between a pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the field and news­pa­per office.

In the ear­ly days, print­ing the Annu­al had encour­aged Lund Hum­pries to install some of the first UK Mono­type equip­ment in 1904.

As an aside, Lund Hum­pries was a print­er of some dis­tinc­tion, and had, for exam­ple, installed Ara­bic and Chi­nese types in the 1930s. A 1974 arti­cle on the firm stat­ed ​‘the Chi­nese room includes over 50,000 matri­ces care­ful­ly
stored in a fire­proof safe’. Lund Humphries closed in 1994.

Decline

The end for the Pen­rose Annu­al was grad­ual. There were breaks in pro­duc­tion and the Annu­al became slim­mer each year. The fact that colour repro­duc­tion was becom­ing the norm meant there was no longer the need to print 10,000 copies — great exam­ples of ​‘process work’ were now com­mon­place. In addi­tion the mam­moth cost of assem­bling this wide vari­ety of process­es, sizes and mate­ri­als in to one vol­ume meant loss­es could no longer be sus­tained and the final vol­ume — Vol­ume 74 — was issued in 1982.

---

Location

Drum­mond Road, Brad­ford, as the home of the Coun­try Press of Lund Humphries — print­er of the Annu­al from 1895 to at least 1978.

---

---

Head­er Image: ​“Pen­rose. Annu­al.” flickr pho­to by Robert E. Kennedy Library at Cal Poly https://flickr.com/photos/kennedylibrary/4645557901 shared under a Cre­ative Com­mons (BY-NC) license