David McKitterick

   David Chambers died on 31 May, aged 95. He had seen this, his magnum opus, published just a few weeks earlier. We can thus no longer enjoy the generous conversations and correspondence about private presses that were so much part of his life. In many ways he seemed to be the epicentre of all kinds of book collecting. While his professional career took him into insurance, latterly as a non-marine underwriter in a Lloyd’s syndicate, his longstanding commitment to collecting and collectors made his name familiar to many more people. As editor of the journal The Private Library, chairman of the Private Libraries Association, and compiler for many years of annual lists of privately printed books, he constantly encouraged others. His own books, which he designed himself to a high standard, included studies of Joan Hassall, Lucien Pissarro and Morris Cox’s Gogmagog Press. Besides that, over many years, there came from his Cuckoo Hill Press evidence of his particular interest in wood engravings, for he was a skilled printer. In an exceptional arrangement with the late Iain Bain, he was entrusted to print a very limited edition of William Blake’s original cuts for Thornton’s Virgil, held by the British Museum and printed on a hand press brought into the Museum specially for the purpose.

   In 1970 he acquired an example of Edward Cowper’s parlour printing press. This was described in Charles Holtzapffel’s Printing Operations for the Use of Amateurs (1836), which he edited with James Mosley in 1971, and it led to a search for all kinds of private presses, mostly dating from before the founding of the Kelmscott Press in 1891. The triumphant present two volumes are a result.

   Definitions of privacy here are particularly elusive, and compromises are unavoidable. For him, ‘the fundamental limits of the present work are that the books must have been printed on a printing press established inside a private house (or its grounds) during the 18th and 19th centuries … On the other hand, I have included presses where the printing was done by professional printers – Strawberry Hill, Lee Priory, Hafod, Middle Hill and other small presses – taking the view that the printing was still domestic in nature even if the proprietor did not want to get ink on his/her own fingers.’ (vol.1, p.15.)

   He divides his work into two roughly equal volumes. The first contains an account of presses, organised so far as possible according to the interests of their owners and interspersed with the most celebrated: after opening with the Strawberry Hill Press, one of the best documented of all, he offers separate chapters on Hafod, Auchinleck, Lee Priory, Middle Hill and Henry Daniel.

Among these he arranges those from antiquaries, religion and politics, ‘specialists’ (including lawyers, historians, linguists, and physicians such as John Hunter), printing for pleasure, magazines, schools and asylums, concluding with those using various duplicating methods such as anastatic printing. While few were owned by women, it is striking how often wives, domestic staff and children were pressed in to help. The second volume lists the known output of each press, whether produced on the table at home or in a better equipped workshop: Chambers has found well over 250 presses in all, dozens of them now witnessed only by unique pieces. His list represents many years of wide-ranging and devoted attention, but he was the first to request information about others he had missed. Unfortunately, though he spent much time in the British Library, and culled dozens of other collections, he was very selective in recording locations of copies that are frequently extremely scarce, even his own.

   Some of these enterprises became very considerable, and their names have become celebrated. Others, such as the Revd John Allen Giles, remain more obscure except to specialists. Beginning in Bampton rectory, near Oxford, after difficulties with his bishop Giles moved in 1855 to 15 Clarendon Road Villas, Notting Hill, and then moved several times again. Apart from a long series of children’s books, most of his output was theological, running into dozens and some volumes running to well over a hundred pages. Luckily, his own memoirs, since published by the Somerset Archaeological Society, give a few glimpses of his labours and portray a man not given to compromise. Some of his scholarly work remains of value, and he engaged with several commercial publishers as his private printing merged with wider publication.

   Since it is often far from clear how much was privately printed in the definition offered by Chambers, much must remain ambiguous. The genealogist Frederick Arthur Crisp, best remembered for his multi-volume Visitation of England and Wales, certainly printed a few books on a private press, but much here is unclear. Of the several presses run in schools, where pupils provided at least some of the staff, the Free School at Whitechapel lasted for well over a century, beginning in 1808 with a pamphlet on the Madras system of teaching. By 1920 it was producing a 264-page Pharmacopoeia of the London Hospital and was also capable of good half-tone printing. Again, one wonders at professional help. On the other hand, there is no doubt at all about the dozens of people who, having obtained the wherewithal to print, managed just one short book or pamphlet before disappearing from the bibliographical scene.

   Few owners were in a position to spend much on their equipment. Francis Blomefield, historian of Norfolk, established a press at Fersfield in 1736 and engaged a printer to produce his books, including a history of Thetford and, much more ambitiously, a multi-volume history of his county in folio. His correspondence, ably edited by David Stoker in 1992, shows how it all proved far from straightforward, as problems developed with the printer, with type (bought second-hand from London) and with paper. Blomefield was cheated at every turn. For most people less ambitious, if they possessed more than the smallest of presses, equipment was usually bought second-hand. It is perhaps not irrelevant that as commercial printers in the 19th century re-equipped with machine presses, so hand-presses no longer of any use could be bought quite cheaply. Type, usually in small quantities, came rarely from founders, and much more commonly from sympathetic printers: it was not always in the best of condition. C H O Daniel, since celebrated for his use of the Fell types obtained from Oxford University Press, was most unusual in obtaining type of such quality.

   Chambers identifies the press at Stowe, owned by the Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, as the best equipped of any of the 18th and 19th centuries; but its output was meagre. Several other people managed without professional equipment, sometimes simply exerting pressure with their thumbs. David Hughes, in Denbigh, built his own press. Robert Russell of Elgin, aged just 15, cut his own type, 70 characters in all. A few others also used homemade type, some of it by no means discreditable.

   Chambers records that Charles Dickinson, of Farley Hill near Reading, composed his poems in the stick. Most other printers were content to work more conventionally. Horace Walpole, Edward Rowe Mores and their many successors established presses at least partly in order to print their own work. Purposes were manifold: in the years round 1800, for example, Sir John Dineley used his for printing advertisements for a wife. The obvious self-publishing hero was the Revd William Davy. Having run into financial difficulties with an earlier project thanks to the failure of subscribers to pay what they had promised, he himself printed his 26-volume System of Divinity in 1795–1807. A poor man but an ingenious one, he built his own press, obtained type from a local printer, and initially printed his work a page at a time. As addenda occurred to him he pasted these on separate slips or leaves into appropriate places, some printed and some manuscript. In its disorderly state the series is a bibliographer’s nightmare, quite apart from the Hebrew which he added by hand and the Greek which he pasted in. Of the final 14 sets, three were incomplete: Chambers does not list the whereabouts of all known copies, which is a pity, for the ordinary sources are inadequate.

   Whether in modest or grand houses, investment and ambition often outran achievement. By no means all was letterpress. In 1854 the stationery firm of Waterlow issued a short book Every Man his Own Printer, or Lithography Made Easy, a guide to simple anastatic methods. In their various forms, these brought printing into more homes.

   Printing is not to be undertaken wantonly, and these volumes repeatedly testify to ambition and determination by all manner of people. Chambers is by no means the first to attempt such a bibliography. John Martin’s pioneering Bibliographical Catalogue of Books Privately Printed (1834) remains an astonishing achievement, and is still essential reading. In 1906 the bookselling firm of Bertram Dobell issued a catalogue of privately-printed books which likewise deserves study. Each defines ‘private press’ differently, and it certainly is not the same as ‘privately printed’. Of the three, Chambers’s two volumes are by far the fullest – and by far the best-looking pieces of printing. They will reward the most careful attention.

'Early Private Presses' by David Chambers is available from the Private Libraries Association.

Please find full details: HERE