St Bride Foundation Conference 2023

By Simon Loxley

I still have a copy of a programme from a St Bride Foundation Conference in 2009, which I kept partly because it was an amazing piece of paper engineering, that seemed to keep unfolding out of itself. It was handsomely printed in gold on an uncoated black board, but over the intervening years the ink has sunk into the surface, leaving the graphics as a barely perceptible ghost image. In a way this seemed quite fitting. I imagined future historians and experts poring over this object, trying to decipher its hieroglyphics and its purpose, an enigmatic survivor from a long-lost, not entirely imaginary graphic golden age when you could enjoy a whole day of design delights and imagination-fuel at St Bride Foundation.

There hasn’t been a conference since 2011, but 11 November 2023 saw the return of the format, titled Innovation. Inspiration. Imagination. Invention. After such a long gap, memory might have made its predecessors an impossible act to follow, but there was no need for concern, as this was a great lineup of speakers. Our gratitude and congratulations go out to host and chief organiser Becky Chilcott, who kicked off proceedings with an interview with French illustrator Jean Jullien, who has taken his playful, flat-colour figures and style into a variety of media, and around the world, using wildly varying scales – from flat planes in gallery spaces to curving around trees and leaning up against, and visually dominating, buildings. As one audience member commented, it was ‘lovely being inspired on a Saturday morning’. And there was much more of that to come.

Jean Jullien and Becky Chilcott

Of course, as conferences progress you notice themes or connections between people’s work. Two of our speakers had taken ideas out into the wider community to help and inspire children and young people. For a while Dominic Wilcox worked with design group The Partners. In terms of a long-term design career, you might think, home and dry, but he walked away from it. ‘I never really worked out graphic design’, he said, but he liked the possibilities of playing with ideas, making unlikely and humorous or surreal connections between ideas and objects, then visually expressing them, often in a three-dimensional form. We saw fabric made from savoury snacks; tiny human dramas acted out on the face of a watch, animated and given possibilities by the revolutions of the second hand; ‘luxury’ skimming stones, encased in gold leaf and with their own carrying case, to be carried around until the perfect moment and setting presents itself, money and perhaps years spent for a couple of seconds with an unpredictable result; recording the sounds of people making things; art exhibitions for dogs.

These were just some of his ideas and creations that delighted our audience. Dominic took his world of imagination on the road, both for adults to imagine their own uses for bizarre and absurd ‘found’ objects, but also crucially to children, through his Little Inventors organisation and engaging with schools around the globe. It has even led him to speak at the United Nations. Life, not just design, benefits from making unlikely connections, seeing possibilities. ‘To be creative you have to be relaxed and open’, and creativity comes from self-confidence, Dominic told us.

Dominic Wilcox

In the Noughties, the American novelist Dave Eggers was instrumental in setting up a writing centre for children and young people in San Francisco. The premises found had a retail usage-only space at the front. Turning this to advantage, he and his colleagues conceived the idea of creating a ‘Pirates’ Shop’, where all the products on sale would be for that specific clientele. The entrance to the workshop space was a door at the back, so the children had a sense of entering a secret world just for them, via an imaginative portal.  After setups elsewhere in the US, Eggers suggested the idea could be extended globally, and the International Alliance of Youth Writing Centers became a reality.

Alistair Hall of design studio We Made This was one of those inspired, and once the cause was taken up by novelist Nick Hornby, some funding began to come in, and the Ministry of Stories was set up in Hackney, offering creative writing and mentoring for local young people, mostly through weekend writing projects, an opportunity to realise creative potential and build confidence. For their shop, the Ministry settled on the theme of monsters, imagining a clientele of vampires, reanimated corpses, werewolves and gigantic apes, and thus began Hoxton Street Monster Supplies. There are no pictures of monsters in the shop – they exist only in your mind, as you browse the products they might want to buy. Neck bolt tighteners, bandage repair kits for mummies, tins of sweets labelled Tinned Fear, (The Collywobbles), Escalating Panic, A Vague Sense of Unease and Creeping Dread, working with authors to create the copy for the labels, such as Earl Grey Tea ‘made from real earls’.  Humour is an essential: ‘Customers are politely requested to refrain from eating the staff’, ‘Beans (magic or otherwise) are not accepted as payment’, ‘Only one giant in the shop at a time’, we are told as we enter. The shop represents a physical walking into a story, a tangible manifestation of imagination at work. There is even an invisible cat, whose purring can be heard in the vicinity of his basket.

Naomi Kent

There isn’t a single corner of graphic design’s past and history from which some sort of inspiration can’t be extracted. Naomi Kent, senior technician at the printmaking department at Birmingham City University, found hers in late nineteenth century ‘artistic printing’ – often superbly printed, but stylistically an incredible melange of styles and decoration that seemed to have no guiding principles apart from complexity and a hoped-for visual luxuriance, and often resulting in a dizzying visual stew. However, Naomi’s particular area of interest is ‘non-linear typesetting’, so what better source of inspiration? She also drew upon the 1930s ‘type pictures’ created from ornaments by Albert Schiller. Naomi delights in metal type’s physicality. ‘I like maths,’ she says, and for her typesetting is ‘a little mathematical puzzle with a wonderfully satisfying solid structure of type’. She also showed us the ‘lockups’, the finished composition in its chase, ‘more beautiful than the outcome a lot of the time’. She used the University’s jewellery department’s equipment to find ways to bend metal rules to create curved lines, and creates her own pictures from type ornaments; despite being modest about her illustration skills, she has succeeded in making delightful, amusing and inventive images while working in a very difficult medium.

At lunchtime you could take a look at some of the Library’s treasures upstairs in the Passmore Edwards Room, but I found myself wandering below to the print room, partly, I had to admit, to see if Mick Clayton had the Premier League’s early kickoff running on his laptop. He did, and I also bought for a tenner a flong of the front page of the Financial Times from August 1986, lost print technology I’ve long wanted an example of.

Visitors to the print workshop

There was a 1951 film called The Magic Box, a patriotically-motivated Festival of Britain production which starred Robert Donat, he of Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, as William Friese-Greene, presented as a lovely, sad-eyed old gentleman who had been tragically overlooked by the world as the inventor of cinema. This may or may not be the case, but the film certainly harboured no illusions about his disastrous finances. Few, if any, have delved deeper into the shadowy corners of the Library’s collection than long-time volunteer and assistant Bob Richardson, and he shed light on Friese-Greene’s further career, a long trail of bankruptcies and bitterly disappointed investors in the wake of his pursuit of inventions and innovations.

There was ‘inkless electrical printing’, which sounds as though it worked on a similar principle to the fax, putting an electrical charge through chemically treated paper. We were amazed to learn that, 124 years previously, Friese-Greene’s Electrical Inkless Printing Syndicate had given their first demonstration of the process in the very room where our conference was now taking place. It didn’t go well. St Bride was wired for alternating current, and the presses needed direct current. The special paper failed to turn up, and they had to make their own hastily on site. The results were unimpressive – and brown. Under the right conditions the process could produce fine results, but they also tended eventually to turn, you guessed it, brown. Losing interest in refining the process, Friese-Greene moved on to his ‘advertising hat’, where moving images could be projected from inside a top hat onto an attached screen. Bob also showed us some early typesetting systems, and pioneering reproductions of newspaper images, in particular the Daily Graphic from 1890, times when an illustrator might be sent to make a drawing of a newsworthy event, and his work expressed back to the office by carrier pigeon.

Sarah Boris

Like Dominic Wilcox, Sarah Boris also got some great in-house graphic design appointments, including working for Phaidon, but found that, for her, the gloss eventually came off. A large percentage of her working week, she realised, was spent in meetings. Seeking to alter this balance, she left to set up her own studio, and has gone on to produce a vast portfolio of work including three-dimensional public art commissions, stunning screen-printed posters and an artist’s book. Interestingly, thinking of that flong, and purportedly dead graphic techniques, she was also experimenting with making her own dry-transfers.

Book cover designers par excellence Jon Gray and Jamie Keenan teamed up to give us a very entertaining, but also highly instructive analysis of how to design a book cover. They had broken this down into nine tactical approaches, including ‘The Obfuscation Theory’, ‘The Unheimlich Conjecture’, ‘Type as Image’ and ‘The Ju Jitsu Supposition’. Easy! Well, of course, in addition you’ll need the pair’s restless visual eye, superb analysis of content and its implications, and their intelligence and humour. Jamie Keenan’s cover for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, not a book anyone would probably fancy tackling these days, was nonetheless a startling and brilliant example of finding and using something ordinary and seemingly unconnected that, depending how you look at it, can become something less ordinary (this fell under ‘The Unheimlich Conjecture’, looking for ‘the strange’ and making it familiar, or vice-versa), and worked on three different levels. The cover for Alissa’s Nutting’s Tampa (Jon) was no less startling, and drew an exclamation from the people sitting in front of me. Chris Offutt’s My Father, the Pornographer, (Jamie), with its pile of books forming a human profile, and a favourite of mine, Jon’s cover for Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, were both examples of ‘Encapsulation’ – images doing more than one job. The presentation was a visual feast from both presenters, humorously and self-deprecatingly delivered.

If Dominic and Sarah had both elected to move away from larger, established structures to work on their own, our final speaker arguably took an opposite direction, from being essentially a solo ‘name’, to applying that name to a design consultancy with international reach and clients, currently including Coca-Cola. I’m old enough to have been fascinated and inspired, as it hit the newsagents’, by Neville Brody’s work for The Face magazine in the 1980s. I’ve subsequently made the assertion to students that he made typography sexy, and was a not-inconsiderable factor in why they were now doing what they were doing. He wasn’t the only one of course, but I’d stand by that statement. Had I been better educated, I’d have been able to appreciate more effectively at the time some of his influences; but you can overthink things, and sometimes it’s good just to take time, look and appreciate.

Neville Brody

That sheer enjoyment of simple two-dimensional shapes and intersections still seemed, I thought, to be a presence in the recent and current work he showed us. I sensed a certain wistfulness while showing us a photo of the young Brody pasting down prints of his hand-drawn letters to create the artwork for Face headlines, and for those times – that greater technology hadn’t necessarily always given us more: ‘The technology has evolved incredibly, but what we can do with it has shrunk… it has become very generic … little windows we can perform in. But what print allowed us to do was experiment with the way you present the content and the information. So we’ve shifted from word, image and layout to now just word and image.’ It was a theme he’d return to later in the talk: ‘…how do we juxtapose images, how do we create stories out of adjacency? Adjacency has kind of disappeared in digital spaces’. Magazine layout allowed this to flourish (and, I’d add, a willingness to spend time looking) which is difficult if not sometimes impossible to maintain through the structures of online media. They certainly don’t encourage us to spend time.

Neville expressed his admiration for St Bride Foundation as a place with a focus on ‘the hand-built… everything is tactile’. Despite the responsibilities and demands of working for massive names, I got the impression that what excites him as a designer may have evolved, but remained in essence unchanged from those days when the bike messenger was standing impatiently to grab that piece of hastily finished artwork and be away. And I (and Mick) shared his pain at the result of that early Premier League kick-off.

Simon Loxley is a graphic designer and author of books and articles on design, typography and design history. He is the author of Emery Walker: Arts, Crafts and a World in Motion (2019), Type is Beautiful: The Story of Fifty Remarkable Fonts (2016), Printer’s Devil: The Life and Work of Frederic Warde (2013), and Type: The Secret History of Letters (2004). Simon designed the Emery Walker’s House logo and designed and edited Ultrabold, the journal of St Bride Library. He is also the author of A Geography of Horror: The Ghost Stories of M.R. James and the Suffolk Landscape (2021).

The London Labour woodblocks

By Chris Anderson

Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1849-1851) let the street folk tell their own stories. To read them today is to step back in time. It followed on from a series Mayhew wrote for the Morning Chronicle, after he resigned, or they fired him (recollections differed). Mayhew continued his work via London Labour, a weekly serial reissued in a single volume every 6 months. Each issue came with one or more illustrations, engraved from daguerreotypes commissioned from Henry Beard. Like the text, they are strikingly real.

One of five cases of woodblocks

St Bride Foundation has five trays of London Labour woodblocks. How did they arrive? Mayhew’s London Labour came to an abrupt halt when the printers, Woodfall, took him to court for unpaid bills. They seized his assets and continued selling London Labour until Mayhew’s supporter, his publisher David Bogue, bought the copyright from Mayhew in 1855. He and Mayhew were on the verge of relaunching the series in 1856 when Bogue’s death ended their plans. His executors sold the London Labour copyright to Griffin & Bohn in 1861. They reissued the serial, to great success, expanding it to 4 volumes with material from other writers and a fair chunk lifted from Mayhew’s work on the Morning Chronicle.

This is the version of London Labour which has come down to us today. Mayhew himself only produced one full and two incomplete volumes. When the Griffin archive was passed onto St Bride Foundation in 1973, the assets included the woodblocks (which is a mystery, as they sold the copyright of London Labour to Maxwell in 1871).ⁱ Mixed together are blocks for Mayhew’s engravings and those added by Griffin in 1864. Those labelled in London Labour as ‘From a daguerreotype by Beard’ were created under Mayhew’s eye between 1849-1851 (eighteen used in volume 1, ten in volume 2 and one in volume 3). Each has a real person and story associated with it.

The first block is an iconic portrait of Mayhew himself, which appeared on the frontispiece of the first volume of London Labour in June 1850.

The first to appear in the London Labour serial, however, is of a costermonger, archetypal street folk who lived by hawking fruit, vegetables, and household staples. In the first issues of London Labour Mayhew focused on their culture and views as much as their way of work. His guide among them was William Clapham, astride his cart in the serial’s first engraving.

What became of him? He died in 1881, The Illustrated Police News obituary, noting he had become a member of several temperance societies, remembered:

an aged costermonger, well known for more than half a century in the alleys of Turnmill-street, Clerkenwell […] a kind of patriarch among the costermongers of central London. Mr. Henry Mayhew obtained from him statistics for his ‘London Labour and the London Poor’ and an illustration of Clapham and his donkey formed the frontispiece. Lord Shaftsbury and other notables have paid visits to his humble dwelling in Fryingpan Alley

^{Illustrated Police News, Saturday 5 February 1881}

The sole block drawn from a daguerreotype in volume 3 is of Sarah Chandler, or ‘Old Sarah’, a blind street musician who played the hurdy gurdy. Mayhew first met Sarah in 1850 when he was writing for the Morning Chronicle. The image, first used in the Griffin version, must have been created for Mayhew but left unused when Woodfall halted the original serial.

Sarah and Mayhew had become friends. She visited his house for tea once a week, and he visited her in hospital when she fell ill.ⁱⁱ What became of her? In 1852, soon after Mayhew’s London Labour ended, she was hit by a cab and died days later from her injuries.

i. St Bride Library, Griffin papers, agreement dated 30 November 1871.

ii. Jenna M. Hardman, Curious conversations: Henry Mayhew and the street-sellers in the media ecology of London Labour and the London Poor, Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. XX (2021), pp.1-10.

Chris Anderson is an independent London historian. He wrote the first full biography of Henry Mayhew in 2018. London Vagabond: the Life of Henry Mayhew is available exclusively on Amazon. He also runs walking tours of Mayhew’s London. For more details see https://londonlabourlondonpoor.com/

Cataloguing the Chiswick Press collection

The latest of our archive collections to be added to the online catalogue is a small collection relating to the Chiswick Press. The collection came to us via the printing firm Eyre & Spottiswoode, which had purchased the Chiswick Press in 1944. The main administrative archives of the Chiswick Press are held by the British Library. The St Bride collection includes 30 cases of printing blocks that made up the surviving stock of the Chiswick Press and volumes of printed proofs, which include annotations and pricing details. The collection displays many of the ornaments and decorative initials the Press became known for. This collection sits alongside our collection of books printed by the Chiswick Press.

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The Chiswick Press was set up in 1811 by Charles Whittingham I (1767-1840), a printer who served as an apprentice in Coventry before establishing his first small press in 1789 in a garret off Fleet Street, London. Whittingham established himself as a pioneer of printing affordable, small editions of popular classics, but turned his focus to illustrated books after setting up the Chiswick Press.

Whittingham’s nephew, Charles Whittingham II (1795-1876), inherited the Press on his uncle’s death in 1840. Prior to this, Whittingham II had apprenticed with his uncle and worked as a partner for the Chiswick Press from 1824-28, before establishing his own press at 21 Tooks Court, Chancery Lane, London. In 1852, Whittingham II moved the business out of Chiswick to his larger Tooks Court premises.

Under Whittingham II, the Chiswick Press became known for fine artistic printing and the use of ornamented initials. It produced some of the finest examples of nineteenth-century English printing, including The Diary of Lady Willoughby (1844) and some of the early designs of William Morris. The use of the old face roman types of William Caslon in The Diary of Lady Willoughby is credited with prompting a revival of the Caslon type.

The iconic ornamentations used by the Chiswick Press were mostly designed by wood-engraver Mary Byfield (1795-1871), with design and engraving work also contributed by Whittingham II’s daughters, Charlotte and Elizabeth Eleanor, who were trained by Byfield.

Charles Whittingham II died in 1876. In 1880, the Chiswick Press was purchased by the publisher George Bell, operating it under the name Charles Whittingham & Co. – a name sometimes used by the two Charles Whittinghams. The business went through a number of different ownerships, until it ceased operation in 1962.

You can see the Chiswick Press collection by making an appointment in our reading room, open every Wednesday 12-3pm and 3:30-6:30pm. Please email library@sbf.org.uk to book a space.

An update on our digitisation project

We are nearing completion of the mammoth project of digitising our collection of pre-1830s type specimens. The collection consists of around 170 bound volumes, with single-sheet specimens kept aside for possible future digitisation work. We have made this treasured part of our collections freely available online, so they can be used by researchers the world over. The project has been funded by the generous donations gathered from our community through our 125^th anniversary fundraiser in 2020.

Didot, Legrand et Cie. (1828). https://archive.org/details/16583

At the time of our last blog update the collection was being prepared for digitisation by conservators at the National Conservation Service, ensuring they were in a suitable condition to physically withstand the digitisation process and to produce good clear images. The specimens have since been transferred to the digitisation studio at the Postal Museum, where each individual page has been photographed and painstakingly organised into digital representations of the original volumes. The photography and file editing are now complete and we are finalising the process of checking the files for any problems, to ensure high quality throughout our digitised collection.

Bower and Bacon (1830). https://archive.org/details/19233_202206

The physical specimen books are now back on our shelves at St Bride and the main bulk of the digital collection has been uploaded to the Internet Archive here, with a small number still to come. The Internet Archive collection features lower resolution PDFs, which can be accessed free of charge. For those requiring higher resolution files, we have 600ppi TIFF and JPEG files, that can be obtained subject to a £25 charge, or £20 for students and Friends of St Bride Library.

We can’t wait to see how you make use of this new digital typographical treasure trove!

Thank you to all our 125^th anniversary supporters, who have made this project possible.

Cataloguing the Beatrice Warde papers

Rather aptly for Women’s History Month, we have recently been cataloguing the papers of Beatrice Warde, a pioneering woman in the world of print and typography, referred to by some as the ‘first lady of typography’.

Beatrice Warde (1900-1969) was born in New York, to parents May Lamberton Becker, a journalist and literary critic, and Gustave Becker, a composer and music teacher. The young Beatrice inherited a fascination with the printed word from her mother and showed an interest in both writing and letterforms during her education at Barnard College, Columbia University. Our collection of her papers includes short stories and poems written by Warde in her youth, demonstrating this early love of language.

Beatrice Warde first entered the professional typographic community in 1921, working for the Typographical Library and Museum of the American Type Founders Company. She soon moved to London to pursue her career, writing articles for trade publications and eventually taking on the role of Editor for The Monotype Recorder. By 1929, Warde was Head of Publicity for the Monotype Corporation and making a name for herself as an in-demand writer, researcher and speaker on all things typographic. 

Warde published much of her written work under the male pseudonym Paul Beaujon. Our collection includes tapes of a recorded 1959 interview, in which Warde explains the reasoning behind her male pseudonym:

“I wasn’t quite sure at that time (which is a long time ago) that women would be taken quite as respectfully. I thought that if I was going to have a pen name, I might as well have a man, and I took a Frenchman’s at that, to make it a little more mysterious.”

Warde was a governor of St Bride Foundation from April 1953 until her death in 1969, an active member of both the Governing Body and Libraries Committee. Very close to the hearts of our library team, Warde dedicated herself to fundraising for our library, heading up the Appeal Sub-Committee to oversee this and securing the future of the collections that we still care for today.

The Beatrice Warde papers held at St Bride include a vast collection of her writing, from childhood short stories to her famous essay The Crystal Goblet, with examples in both manuscript and published form. There are examples of her manifesto for printers, This is a Printing Office, in multiple languages and variations. Photographs of Warde mingling with the great and the good of the print world can be seen alongside correspondence and ephemera such as a family tree. The collection also encompasses a large amount of material relating to Warde’s work setting up the May Lamberton Becker Reading Room at the National Book League, cementing her mother’s legacy in promoting the printed word.

You can view our work-in-progress catalogue of the Beatrice Warde papers here. This project is part of a much wider programme of cataloguing our archives and special collections at St Bride Library. We have added specialist archive cataloguing software to our collections management system, so when searching our online catalogue you will now see separate tabs for ‘Printed Material’ and ‘Archives’. We have been surveying our collections and prioritising them for cataloguing based on their research value and relevance for our researchers. We are working to add many more of our special collections to the catalogue, making them more accessible to researchers and building a clearer understanding of the treasures we hold.

An update from St Bride Library

Thanks to the generosity of our community, we raised over £65,000 in our Crowdfunder campaign towards the end of 2020. We could not be more grateful for this support to help us celebrate 125 years of St Bride Library and secure the future of our collections. We pledged to use this funding towards:

• Providing opportunities for young people to gain work experience in our Library, Archive and Print Workshop.
• Developing new print and design workshops.
• Curating and filming a physical and online talk series.
• Curating physical and online exhibitions.
• Creating an online digitised collection of our unique treasures, so our communities can access them whenever and wherever.
• Continuing to conserve and catalogue our irreplaceable archives of print and typography.

Since then, the Library team have been busy working from home on kitchen tables and makeshift desks, getting plans in motion for some exciting projects. Bringing the spirit of St Bride to your homes, we have presented a series of remote talks curated by the excellent Becky Chilcott. A treasure trove of recorded talks can be found here.

Some recent online talks available on Vimeo

Behind the scenes, we have been carefully planning our pilot digitisation project. Informed by a survey of our library community, we have selected our pre-1830 type specimens as the first part of our collections to be digitised. Our type specimens form the backbone of our collections and are in high demand by researchers, so we are excited to be working to make them available to you online. These earliest examples will especially benefit from digitisation as some are fragile and susceptible to damage through regular handling – the availability of digital copies will reduce the need for physical handling.

A sample of how our digitised type specimens will look

Conservators – the magicians of the library world – from the National Conservation Service have begun the process of assessing the condition of the type specimens. Conservation treatment will ensure the collection is in sound condition so that clear images can be captured and the items can safely withstand the digitisation process. Volumes have been surface cleaned and any significant tears, loose bindings or detached boards will be repaired.

To make sure we create a digital collection that meets the specific needs of our audience of typographers and designers, we have thoroughly researched the technical specifications for this project. We have gathered advice from sector colleagues such as the Letterform Archive and the National Archives’ digital experts and have spoken to a number of digitisation studios. Once the conservators have worked their magic, we will be getting started with the process of digitising the collection, which you should see materialising online later this year.

Some of our pre-1830 type specimens awaiting digitisation

Now that we are back in our building, able to once more inhale the particular ‘old books’ odour of Room 19 and physically handle our beloved collections, we are preparing to begin a cataloguing programme. As the first step of this we have procured an archives-specific collections management software to work alongside our existing library catalogue and are beginning to prioritise collections for cataloguing. Cataloguing our archives and special collections will make them easily discoverable for researchers using our online catalogue, as well as improving our own knowledge of and ability to manage these unique collections.

We have been keeping busy delivering on our 125^th anniversary ambitions, despite the challenges of working remotely for much of this year (namely a cat with a penchant for sleeping on laptops). We are excited to share more of the outcomes of this work with you later in the year and will keep you all updated on our progress. In the meantime, our reading room and workshop are bouncing back to life, so do pay us a visit!

Mr. Baker’s rubber alphabet

The Story of Britain’s Most-Popular Printing Toy

Nineteen-twenty-two was a good year for budding printers. In the leafy London suburb of Twickenham a young man called Donald Aspinall set up the Adana printing machine company, while a short distance to the east, in the City of London, three businessmen were laying the foundations of an equally famous printing-related company. The name of their small enterprise—The Charter Stamp Company—means very little today, but their most famous product—the John Bull Printing Outfit—is probably more fondly remembered than the Adana press.

John Bull Printing Sets are among Britain’s oldest and most popular toys and the most common childhood introduction to ‘relief printing’. The toy was looked upon as the perfect ‘stocking filler’ by generations of doting parents and grandparents. Cheap and simple to use, they provided hours of fun for little fingers and a much more typographically creative form of wallpaper gratffiti than crayons alone could ever do.

St Bride Library has a small number of John Bull outfits. Acquired over the past century or so they are not catalogued, but form part of our Special Collections. The manufacturer’s name varies according to the age of each set and boxes sometimes carry “Charter Series”, “Carson-Baker” or “Carbak” names and logos, depending upon when they were made.

Charter Series: The Zoo Printing Set

The Carbak Picture Printing Outfit

In 1922 rubber stamp maker John William Baker of Sydenham, Harold Christie, a toy dealer from Staines, and bulb-grower Thomas Baker of Spalding, established the Charter Stamp Company with capital of £3,000 divided into £1 shares. This was a very healthy sum indeed for 1922, equivalent to around £175,000 today.

There is documentary evidence that Charter Stamp had traded for a number of years before the creation of the 1922 company. A number of late Victorian and Edwardian rubber stamping sets for children also carry the “Charter” trade mark. A 1916 sales receipt from a Wandsworth stationer also clearly refers to a John Bull Printing Set, eleven years before the trade mark was registered with the Department of Trade.

The incorporation paperwork for the company is dated 23rd March 1922 and states that the company was founded “to carry on business as manufacturers and dealers in stamps and dies, toys, stationers’ sundries…and articles of any description”. The directors set up their head office at 57 Old Street in the City of London and spent the next five years selling stationery and making rubber stamps for office use. The manufacture of rubber stamping toys for children was carried on alongside these commercial activities.

Five years after the foundation of the Charter Stamp Company, in February 1927 the John Bull trademark was formally registered with the submission of artwork which would be used in packaging design for the next five decades. The original watercolour of John Bull and his dog survives in the National Archives at Kew. The distinctive box design became so recognisable that in January 2009 The Guardian political cartoonist Martin Rowson showed the Chancellor of the Exchequer trying to re-start the UK economy after the global financial crash with a John Bull Quantatative Easing Kit. The iconic box design was parodied in the newspaper cartoon, which can be viewed here.

Early John Bull sets consisted of just upper-case characters, around 12 point in size. Rubber illustration blocks would be introduced into the sets by the late 1920s, but had also been sold separately under the “Charter” name for three decades or more. Early sets sometimes included a rubber stamp showing the John Bull figure illustrated on the box lid. By the early 1930s a slab-serif typeface with upper and lower-case characters had been introduced and more expensive sets included printing blocks showing a clown, juggler, and Native American Chief and farm or zoo animals.

Endless versions of the rubber stamping sets were issued from the company works in South Norwood. Sets were numbered anywhere from “1” to “250”. There were also “Special” sets which were sometimes indistinguishable from the basic kits. The smallest set was marginally larger than a box of kitchen matches while the largest dwarfed a standard Monopoly board game box. The most commonly seen survivors are sets No. 4, 8, 18 and 12.

Perhaps the strangest John Bull product is that which uses Monotype. These sets, with Monotype metal types, appeared soon after the WW2 and British patents dated October 1946 cover the special typeholder required (Patent 617,495) and the custom-designed cardboard typecase (619,092). The set contained 120 pieces of 12pt Monotype Gill Sans, although, rather curiously, the accompanying instruction leaflet was set almost entirely in Stephenson Blake’s rival sanserif, Granby. A special wooden typeholder accommodated two lines of type, held in place with a thin wooden wedge. Only en-spaces were provided for use between words. A foam-rubber ink pad with non-toxic, water-based ink was supplied, so the results cannot have been very satisfactory. By 1950 this metal variant had been discontinued.

John Bull Metal Type Printing Outfit using Monotype Gill Sans

The Charter Stamp Company moved head office several times in the early years of trading, but would eventually settle at 57 Southwark Street, London SE1, where the sets were also produced. The company proclaimed the John Bull Printing Set to be 100% British made. This was true. Boxes were made on site, the rubber letters were moulded and vulcanised at the factory and even the non-toxic water-based ink was brewed up in large buckets. The product range expanded and by the early 1960s included a small rotary hand press (Model No. 5) which could accommodate several line of rubber type in a grooved drum, rather like the American Multigraph printing machine.

On 25th May 1946 a meeting was convened to discuss a possible change of name for the company. The maiden name of founder John Baker’s mother was Carr, and he was therefore “Carr’s son”. Baker was of the opinion that double-surname companies carried more commercial clout. There was a famous precedent for this, with tea importer and blender Arthur Brooke inventing a non-existent business partner—Mr. Bond—in 1869. On 11th July 1946, the Charter Stamp Company became Carson-Baker Limited and the “Charter” trademark became “Carbak”. “Charter Series” packaging materials were still being used in the 1950s until the stockpile of old box designs was gradually exhausted, so the two trademarks often appeared side-by-side

In the late 1970s costly plastic injection-moulding equipment was purchased for soft polymers, although the old vulcanised rubber system was retained for foreign language sets. The export market was important as a source of income, but the cost of producing new moulds for foreign territories was prohibitive. In the 1970s between 60,000 and 100,000  John Bull Printing Outfits were being made each year.

Surplus manufacturing capacity allowed the production of components for another maker of educational rubber stamps. The Mapograph Company of Chiswick produced a roller printing system which allowed images to be applied to the pages of school exercise books. Maps, biology diagrams, trees of Britain and technical illustrations made up a substantial library of stock images for scholastic use. Invented in 1924 by Alfred Kings and Bernard Simons, the Mapograph system used a deep relief rubber stamp on a wooden roller. A spring-loaded mechanism re-set the roller, giving a perfect print (theoretically) on each page. Mapograph inks and stamp pads were made by Carson-Baker. When the elderly owner of Mapograph retired in 1978, the company became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Carson-Baker.

Toy manufacturer Cowan DeGroot were the largest distributor of John Bull sets and when John Baker retired in the 1960s, Carson-Baker was acquired by their main customer. The “Codeg” trademark replaced “Carbak” on packaging and advertising material. Following the takeover, Cowan DeGroot expanded the range of products. By 1970 children could buy a John Bull farmyard set, backgammon, draughts and even a board game version of the BBC Mastermind quiz show. Frustratingly for Codeg, this had to be called Masterbrain because a rival board game made by Invicta plastics and unconnected with the BBC series, already used the name Mastermind. Nevertheless, the packaging for Masterbrain proudly stated that it was “brought to you by the makers of the famous printing outfits”.

Cowan DeGroot sold the John Bull trademark to Dekkertoys of Peterborough in the late 1980s, but the famous printing sets are no longer available. Second-hand sets occasionally appear on Ebay but new printing outfits are no longer manufactured.

My passion for letterpress and typography was sparked by the gift of a John Bull set at the age of five. Sadly, with the demise of John Bull printing sets, young letterpress printers today must seek their inspiration elsewhere.

Bob Richardson

Library Manager

St Bride Foundation

St Bride Staff & Volunteers interviews

 

Bob Richardson – Library Manager

St Bride Foundation is run by a small family of staff and volunteers. During lockdown we took the opportunity to ask everyone a few short questions so you can get to know us a little better. Click on the names of each member of staff for a PDF of each interview for an easier read, especially for those of us who didn’t use the less is more approach for our answers …

Alison Lee – Foundation Manager

Steve Linehan -Workshop Volunteer

Nurit Karol – Accounts Assistant

Mary Machiraju – Library Volunteer

Andrew Long – Workshop Apprentice

Charlie Osbourne – Conferences and Events Coordinator

Mick Clayton – Workshop Manager

Sophie Hawkey-Edwards – Foundation Librarian

Bob Richardson – Library Manager

Barry Felstead – Workshop Volunteer

Angie Brignell – Conservation Volunteer

Philip Mould – Finance Officer

Becky Chilcott – Events Curator

Joe Rosser – Facilites Manager

 

 

 

Sue Shaw obituary

Here at St Bride Foundation we are very sad to share the news of the death of Sue Shaw.

Letterpress printing was in danger of disappearing in the 1990s, but Susan Shaw, who has died aged 87, determined to rescue it. After a career in publishing during which she learned the art of typographic design, she heard that the once great Monotype Corporation was in danger of bankruptcy. In 1992, with funding from the infant National Heritage Memorial Fund, and backed by her own astounding energy, she organised the transport from Redhill to Stockwell of all that could be saved, from the crucial equipment to the equally vital documents. In Stockwell, Sue was able to buy out the occupants of an old industrial mews and install her new treasures, inaugurating what became the Type Museum. Not content with this, in 1996 she managed to persuade the owners of Stephenson Blake of Sheffield, the last surviving makers of metal type for hand-composition, to sell their plant going back to the sixteenth century; this time the Heritage Lottery Fund provided finances. In the same year, she was able to add the equipment of Robert De Little, the last makers of wood-letter, used for printing play-bills and posters. Some of the original work-force came too, but there were never enough hands to keep all the equipment working at once, so she changed the name from Type Museum to Type Archive. There it remains, the repository of printing history in Britain over five centuries, and a memorial to Susan Shaw, who devoted her life to preserving it. Her last triumph was to see the name of the street where it is changed to ‘Alphabet Mews’.

Nicolas Barker

From the St Bride Archives: Hats off to George!

We had a visitor to St Bride Library a few weeks before its temporary closure due to the Corona Virus pandemic. She was trying to find out a little more about an ancestor in the printing trade who was described in the 1901 census as a ‘Hat-Tip Stamper’. Did we have any information about this obscure trade? A search through the general catalogue found nothing, but tucked away in our Special Collections file was a reference to George Fowler, Hat-Tip Stamper of Bermondsey, south-east London. A research session in Room 19, our main book stack, quickly located a small box of ephemera relating to George Fowler’s business activities.

The Special Collections at St Bride number 200 or more and include a vast range of materials related to printing and publishing. Here you will find 1,051 boxes of original steel punches from the Caslon Foundry and the original flongs (moulds) for Harold Curwen’s Puffin Picture Book No. 70 on the subject of “Printing”, together with trade union banners, scandalous broadsides, dozens of original woodcuts by Robert Gibbings, and others used in the works of Henry Mayhew. There are also many boxes of curiosities, including a handful of items from London’s last Hat-Tip Stamper.

Every piece of top quality headgear for a gentleman has a circular, square or diamond-shaped piece of satin sewn into the crown. This is often covered by a thin piece of celluloid to protect the satin ‘tip’ from Brylcreem or pomade, for a hat-tip is the small panel which carries the maker’s name and sometimes the size of the hat. George Fowler was Britain’s last hat-tip stamper. Each piece of satin went through George’s engraving press and all were carefully printed by hand. There was no mass-production of these satin tips.

George Fowler was a skilled engraver and made his own intaglio plates for producing the ‘tips’. At St Bride we have a small box of artefacts left behind when his business eventually ceased trading. We have not been able to ascertain the date of closure, but we do know from genealogy records and census returns that hat-tip stamping was recorded as a trade as early as 1830, half a century before George was born.

By the end of 1950 only George Fowler remained at this unusual trade in the UK. From a business which had once employed many hundreds of workers it had shrunk to a one-man operation, based in a first-floor warehouse workshop in Bermondsey. George’s work is often exquisitely detailed, which is all the more remarkable for something which rarely saw the light of day. The detail in some of his engravings is as fine as any woodcut by Thomas Bewick and his printing skills were second to none. A number of his ‘tips’ survive at St Bride in a small album, together with a handful of sketches of work in progress, rough ideas and envelopes filled with finished artwork.

 

The blank ‘tips’ were normally supplied by the hatters. Bundles of pre-cut silk or satin pieces would arrive at George Fowler’s works and he would complete the orders as required. Some examples we have are 2-up, reducing the printing speed by half. Perhaps he also printed 4-up, although this would have incurred considerably more initial expense, as additional plates had to be engraved by hand, but this might have been advantageous for larger orders. The surviving records are fragmentary, so it isn’t possible to tell how he approached each job. The tip designs we have at St Bride include all of the top names in hat-making; Harrods, Gieves, Dunn & Company and many others, including a special design for Panama hats.

The limited speed of production meant that George Fowler could never have supplied vast quantities of his work to High Street department stores. His product was very much for the upper-class hatters of Britain. His finest work appeared inside silk toppers, hand-sewn Harris tweed fishing hats and the bowlers worn by city gents. The quality of George’s work made it expensive and it probably cost more to print some of the better quality hat-tips than it does to manufacture a cheap baseball cap in the far-East today.

Apart from fragmentary business records, the only recorded description of George’s work appears in a cartoon strip drawn by Peter Jackson for the London Evening News in September 1950. George kept this short illustrated article and filed it away with his company records. The original newspaper clipping was very faded and creased but a little time spent with Adobe Photoshop has restored it to original condition and Jackson’s drawing of George at the press is reproduced in this blog entry so readers can get some idea of what he looked like and see the kind of press he used. The curious ‘swan-neck’ arrangement atop the press contains a small pulley, connected to a counterweight, which lifts the engraving blanket each time the star wheel is turned to open the press.

We have no idea exactly when George Fowler retired, but it was probably in the late 1950s or early 1960s. His name does not appear in trade directories during the first half of the twentieth century. As the only remaining professional hat-tip stamper in 1950 he probably had little need to advertise as there was no competition for this specialised work, which was already in steep decline. The cartoon strip shows a man who was probably in his sixties, which ties in with a birth record for Bethnal Green dated 1885, when a George Fowler was born to Henry and Emily Fowler of Bermondsey. This is speculation of course, but George was born at a time when few people moved far away from their birthplace, so there’s a strong possibility that this is our man. An internet search reveals nothing of his life after 1950. There is no bankruptcy record on file in The London Gazette, so perhaps the business was simply wound up.

Did George continue beyond his retirement age, or did the work fizzle out completely as cheaper, faster printing methods were developed? We have nothing at St Bride which answers these questions, but if the genealogical researcher who made the original enquiry at the library comes up with any additional facts we will add them to the Fowler material at St Bride. We would like to know a little more about this unique printer who was probably the very last of his line.