The year 1891 saw innovations which would have a distinct if modest impact on the subsequent century: the zip fastener was invented, and the Swiss Army knife was developed. More momentously, a man named Burroughs was granted a patent for an adding machine.

Death culled Herman Melville, Charles Stuart Parnell, Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman. Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the great civil engineer who had sorted out many of London’s sewerage problems, died on 15 March, and the painter Georges Seurat followed on 29th of the same month. On 7 April the American showman P. T. Barnum died at the age of 80 asking ‘How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?’

The year 1891 saw a Factory and Workshops Act raise the minimum working age to 11, and an Assisted Education Act that abolished fees for elementary education. This was an act the results of which would have been watched closely by all those members of the publishing and printing trades, rightly convinced that they could make money out of the provision of textbooks and other school supplies.

The number of those employed in the ‘Paper, Printing, Books, and Stationery’ sector of the UK economy had more than doubled in the twenty years since 1871 and was now at 256,000. This sector was serving a population of 37.7 million, the overwhelming majority of whom were literate to some degree or other.