ArtsFest Online: Printing and Print Culture in the Midlands: a Webinar

As part of our ArtsFest Online autumn programme, the University of Wolverhampton is pleased to present an online talk with members of The Centre for Printing History and Culture. Hosted by Dr Malcolm Dick Director of the Centre for West Midlands History, University of Birmingham, this webinar was recorded on 17th September 2020.

The Midlands was Britain’s most historically important printing region outside London. Through its connections with William Caslon I, England’s first native type-founder (Cradley), and John Baskerville, the famous printer, (Birmingham) it became a centre of world printing during the mid-eighteenth century. Its contribution to printing history, however, extends beyond Caslon and Baskerville, and for three centuries the region’s printers, type-founders, engravers, bookmakers, newspaper makers and typographic educators combined to make the region not only a national and international typographic force. But it is not simply technological advances that made the region’s printing trade significant. Its products were a reflection of its changing intellectual, social, spiritual, and commercial life, which has been preserved through the production of books, broadsides, ballads, newspapers and a range of general printing.

This book launch draws attention to a special edition of the journal Midland History, 2020, vol. 45, no 2 (Taylor & Francis Online ) which is dedicated to printing history and culture of the Midlands. Each of the authors will give a short presentation on their articles and there will be ample opportunity for discussion. Contributors include:

John Hinks: The history of printing and print culture: contexts and controversies.
Caroline Archer: Places, spaces and the printing press: trade interaction in Birmingham.
Sahar Afshar: The Gurmukhi type of Oxford University Press.
Caroline Archer: The Baskerville Punches: revelations in craftsmanship.
John Grayson: Imperfect printed enamel surfaces: interpreting marks of eighteenth-century Midland craftsmanship.
David Osbaldestin: The art of ephemera: typographic innovations of nineteenth-century Midland jobbing printers.
Guy Sjögren: Proclamation or persuasion: promoting the Birmingham cut-nail trade 1827-95.
Andrew Jackson and Elaine Johnston: Provincial newspapers, sports reporting and the origins, rise and fall of women’s football: Lincolnshire, 1880s-1940s.
Jenny Gilbert: ‘Better dressed than Birmingham’? wholesale clothing catalogues and the communication of mass fashion, 1920s-1960s.