A Short History of English Printing, 1476-1898

by Henry R. Plomer

At the time of the South Sea scheme Barber took large shares, and, it is said, amassed a considerable fortune before the bubble burst. But he was indebted mainly to the patronage of Lord Bolingbroke for his success as a printer. Through that statesman he obtained the contract for printing the votes of the House of Commons, and by the same influence he became printer of the London Gazette, The Examiner, and Mercator, printer to the City of London, and finally received from the Queen the reversion of the office of Royal Printer, which he soon after relinquished to Baskett for £1500.

Elected as alderman of Baynard Castle ward, Barber filled the office of Sheriff, and in 1733 became Lord Mayor of the City of London. As Lord Mayor, he gained great popularity from his opposition to the Excise Bill, and by permitting persons tried and acquitted at the Old Bailey to be discharged without any fees. He died on the 22nd January 1740.

Much amusement, not altogether unmixed with uneasiness, was caused in the printing trade between 1727 and 1740 by a futile attempt to introduce stereotyping. A Scotch printer having complained to a goldsmith in Edinburgh of the vexatious delays and inconvenience of having to send to London or Holland for type, it occurred to William Ged, the goldsmith in question, that, to use the words of Timperley (p. 584), the transition from founding single letters to founding whole pages, 'should be no difficult matter.' He made several experiments, and at length satisfied himself that his scheme was practicable. Accordingly, in 1727, he entered into a contract with an Edinburgh printer to carry out the invention, but after two years his partner withdrew, being alarmed at the probable cost. Ged then entered into partnership with William Fenner, a stationer in London, by whom he was introduced to Thomas James, the founder, and a company was formed to work the scheme. But James, perhaps influenced by the representations of his 'compositors,' whom the new invention threatened with the loss of work, instead of helping, did his utmost to ruin the undertaking and its inventor. Instead of supplying the best and newest type from which the matrices might be made, he furnished the worst, whilst his workmen damaged the formes. Much the same happened at Cambridge, where Ged was for a time installed as printer to the University. He struggled against the opposition so far as to produce two Prayer Books, but such was the animosity shown to the new invention, that the books were suppressed by authority, and the plates broken up. To add further to his troubles, dissension broke out between James and Fenner, neither of whom had any cause to be proud of their action towards Ged, who, disheartened and ruined, returned to Edinburgh. There another attempt was made by the friends of the inventor to produce a book, but no compositor could be found to set up the type, and it was only by Ged's son working at night that the edition of Sallust, and a few theological books, were finished and printed at Newcastle. Ged died in 1749, and his sons subsequently emigrated to the West Indies.

Next to the King's printing-house, the press of which we have the most accurate knowledge at this time was that of William Bowyer, the elder and the younger. The seven volumes of Nichols's Literary Anecdotes give a complete record of the work of this printing-house, and from them the following brief account has been taken. William Bowyer, the elder, had been apprentice to Miles Flesher, and was admitted to the freedom of the Company of Stationers on October 4th, 1686. He started business on his own account in Little Britain in 1699, with a pamphlet of ninety-six pages on the Eikon Basilike controversy. He afterwards moved into White Friars, where, on the night of January 29th, 1712, his printing office was burnt to the ground; among the works that perished in the flames being almost the whole impression of Atkyn's History of Gloucestershire, Sir Roger L'Estrange's Josephus, 'printed with a fine Elzevir letter never used before'; the fifteenth volume of Rymer's Fœdera; Thoresby's Ducatus Leodiensis, and an old book, of Monarchy, by Sir John Fortescue, in 'Saxon,' with notes upon it, printed on an 'extraordinary paper' (Nichols's Literary Anecdotes, vol. i. p. 56). This short list of notable works proves that Bowyer had a flourishing business at the time of the catastrophe. A subscription was at once raised for his relief, and £1162 subscribed by the booksellers and printers in a very short time. A royal brief was also granted to him for the same purposes, and by this he received £1377, making a grand total of £2539, with which he began business anew. In remembrance of his misfortune, Bowyer had several tail-pieces and devices engraved, representing a phoenix rising from the flames.

In 1715 Bowyer the elder printed Miss Elstob's Anglo-Saxon Grammar. The types for this were cut by Robert Andrews from drawings made by Humphrey Wanley, and were given to the printer by Lord Chief-Justice Parker. But these types were very indifferently cut. Wanley himself said 'when the alphabet came into the hands of the workman (who was but a blunderer) he could not imitate the fine and regular stroke of the pen; so that the letters are not only clumsy, but unlike those that I drew.'

In 1721 Bowyer printed an edition of Bishop Bull's Latin works in folio, but lost £200 by the impression. The following year his son, William Bowyer the younger, joined him in the business.

The younger Bowyer had received an University education, though he never succeeded in taking a degree. He was, however, a highly cultivated man, and employed his pen in many of the controversies of the time, writing Remarks on Mr. Bowman's Visitation Sermon in 1731, and on Stephen's Thesaurus in 1733, and in 1744 a pamphlet on the Present State of Europe. But at the beginning of his connection with the printing-house, he was mainly concerned in reading the proofs of the learned works entrusted to his father for printing, and though towards the latter end of the elder Bowyer's days the son may have taken a more active part in the practical work, as we read of his appointment as printer of the votes in the House of Commons in 1729, and as printer to the Society of Antiquaries in 1736, it was not until his father's death, in 1737, that the sole management of the business devolved upon him.

One of the earliest works upon which the younger Bowyer was employed as 'reader' was Dr. Wilkins's edition of Selden's Works, printed by Bowyer the elder in six folio volumes in 1722. The publication of this book marks an era in the history of English printing, for the types with which it was printed were cut by William Caslon.

This famous type-founder, who by his skill raised the art of printing to a higher level than it had reached since the days of John Day, was born at Cradley, near Hales Owen in Shropshire. We are indebted for his biography partly to Bowyer and partly to Nichols, but it must be confessed that the earlier part of it is vague and unconvincing. According to this oft-quoted story, Caslon began life as an engraver of gun-locks, and made blocking tools for binders. This was somewhere about 1716, in which year it is said John Watts, the printer, became his patron, and employed him to cut type punches. Bowyer became acquainted with him from seeing some specimen of his lettering on a book, and took him to the foundry of James, in Bartholomew Close. Bowyer next advanced him some money, as also did Watts, and with these loans he set up for himself, his first essay in type-founding being a fount of Arabic for the Psalter published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. When he had finished the Arabic, i.e. somewhere about 1724 or 1725, he cut his own name in Roman type and placed it at the foot of the specimen. This attracted the notice of Samuel Palmer, the author of a very unreliable History of Printing, and with Palmer, Caslon worked for some time, but at length transferred his services to William Bowyer, for whom he cut the types of the 'Selden.'