Print designers had to be very skilled and able to create anything from a beautiful poster to a very functional report.
In St Albans, Dangerfield became known for their colour printing and the posters they printed for London Transport, while Eversheds, who took over the factory from Dangerfields, were known for providing calendars and stationery for other businesses. Despite their very different areas of work,, both needed create visually appealing designs that matched the needs of their customers.
Today, the visual look of hand-operated letterpress printing has come back into fashion. Products based around the aesthetic appeal of a well-designed font or simple illustrations can be found in many shops and creating them is becoming a popular hobby.
The craft and skill of print design that was once taught at the St Albans School of Art is now taught at its successor the University of Hertfordshire, alongside newer skills such as 3D printing.
Dangerfield Printing Works
Dangerfield Printing Works opened in a factory on Inkerman Road, St Albans in 1896. Among the firm’s specialities was the printing of large colour advertising posters and lettering transfers for railway coaches, buses and trams. The company had a contract with London Transport and began to produce many of their now iconic posters.
Designing for print
Today companies and individuals can work with designers to layout print using computer programmes and elements can be easily adjusted and presented. Previously, companies used sample books to show off the sorts of designs they could produce.
All of the books in this case were created and used by companies who printed in St Albans.
1. Mr Winter’s scrapbooks of printing
This scrapbook contains examples of the wide range of printing done by Mr Winter. This was a small printing press, but he printed everything from leaflets to business cards and worked with several well-known local companies. You can see his inky fingerprints on one of these pages.
2. St Albans Press House specimens of book type
3. St Albans Press House specimens of circulars
These books were created to help customers select the fonts, sizes and designs they wanted when placing print orders. The first two are from Fisher Knight & Co. and the St Albans Press House was a name used by Gibbs & Bamforth. Each printing firm would have its own selection of fonts available, so depending on the style you wanted you had to select the right firm.
4. Leaves: Type Manual including Glossary of Terms
5. Compendium for printers & buyers of printing
6. Folder of printed logos
These two books were produced by Fisher Knight & Company, they show the different fonts the company used and other symbols that could be printed. The folder was created by Eversheds and contains a wide variety of logos for different businesses from dairies and butchers to stationers and offices. Customers who did not have a logo of their own could use one of these specimen logos.
Form & Function
The printing companies in St Albans produced a wide variety of material that needed to be designed and laid out. Balancing text in a document or a newspaper is an important skill and in this case you can trace the development of design from the simple text of Solomon George Shaw’s printing to the colourful designs of Eversheds’ headed papers.
1. First edition of the Herts Advertiser (printed by Gibbs & Bamforth)
The first edition of The St Albans Times and Herts. Advertiser came out on Saturday 7 July 1855. It cost one-and-a half pence and contained eight pages of national news (including an account of the Crimean War) which was brought from London by stagecoach for setting in St Albans. The first edition consisted of 300 copies produced on a hand-operated press.
2. A list of all the estates and benefactors belonging to and conferred on the church and parish of St Peter (printed by Solomon George Shaw)
3. Eversheds Promotional booklet calendar range 1987
4. Price list for R.A Ashby
5. Mid Herts election postcard for Hon. Vicary Gibbs, 1904 (printed by Richardson)
6. Headed paper letter to H Green (printed by Fisher Knight & Co.)
7. Address label with "Printed matter" (printed by Fisher Knight & Co.)
8. Salvation Army Christmas cards (printed by Campfield)
9. Hermes Magazine, Napsbury Hospital
Patients and staff worked together to produce the Hermes Magazine at Napsbury Hospital. They wrote the articles, drew pictures and then printed and bound the copies in the hospital’s own print room (pictured here).
10. Drivers' Record book
11. Lard and dripping bag samples
12. Eversheds’ own business cards and stationery
13. Book of Pass Book sample pages
Companies like Eversheds worked with many different businesses. They had to print onto a wide range of materials from paper and card to a lard bag. They also had to create designs that worked with their brands and looked attractive to customers. The variety of logos, fonts and colours available to their customers was huge.
14. A variety of headed note paper for St Albans’ businesses printed by Eversheds
