Technologies of Publishing
Authors: Weedon Alexis 
Published: September 2024

The technologies of book and periodical manufacture moved publishing from the business of lone booksellers and their friends to that of a limited company tied by trade partnerships in production, distribution, and sales with other manufacturing firms. It is wrong to see this as driven solely by technology; other factors such as increasing population, the spread of education, and the politics of imperialism were behind this burgeoning of print. Yet the innovations in paper manufacture, printing and typesetting, and binding and distribution meant that by the end of the century books and periodicals were affordable to the vast majority of the population of the British Empire and across the United States. The “iron hand” press used in the eighteenth century was superseded by steam-powered “printing machines” which over the century doubled and then quadrupled the size of the sheets which could be printed. In Samuel Smiles’s classic Men of Invention and Industry (New York: Harper and Bros., 1884), he included Frederick Koenig as the inventor of steam printing, along with the Walter’s Press of The Times and William Clowes’s London plant, which printed the first cheap high circulation periodical, Charles Knight’s The Penny Magazine, in 1832. These were given equal billing by Smiles alongside inventors of the screw propeller, the marine chronometer, and the industries of ship building, gas lighting, and the British silk industry. The steam engine powered the continuation of new designs of mechanical presses and bigger and faster presses, and those needed paper which was cheap and made in bespoke sizes and in rolls for the press. These and other innovations changed the look and feel of the book over the century. Scholarship has focused on ‘The Material Book’ as it is felt in the hand as it moved from a bespoke binding in tooled leather for the customer’s library to being sold off the shelf in the bookshop in a case-bound copy with colored boards providing a hard cover, a printed dust jacket, or in collections of books in uniform bindings in imitation a ‘Gentleman’s Library.’ Studies of The Material Book acknowledge the proliferation in quality and bindings for a retail market with a range of price points, at the cheaper end of that market producing sixpenny, tuppenny and penny paper-bound books printed economically on magazine presses on wood-pulp paper and in small type for the young newly literate working classes. Such studies document the revolution in printing technologies which extended into a wider visual culture; late-19th-century wallpaper and textile designs are still reproduced today, and reproductions of paintings through engraving, lithography, and color printing made art available in the Victorian home. The scientific experimentation in materials and inks created new color ranges and the photomechanical reproduction of photographs through screen mesh led to the burgeoning of a pictorial press. Creative typography and graphic design in advertising enticed the eye; in the street there were billboards and in shop windows packaging to persuade customers. This bibliography draws together key contemporary sources from the Victorian period and modern scholarship with a focus on UK and United States.