It has often been said that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Gutenberg would have been at home in any print shop. The common wooden press still operated, with minor changes, as his press had done, and the processes of setting type, making up the printing surface and applying the ink had not changed at all. By 1900, however, few printing businesses would have looked familiar. Although letter-press remained the primary process for the reproduction of large areas of text, many aspects of production had been speeded up and mechanised. New techniques were commonly in use both for setting type and the production of illustrations. In no print trade sector was this more the case than for the production of newspapers and other large-circulation periodicals. This chapter will explore the changes in print technologies and working practices that occurred in the production of daily newspapers and other periodicals during the nineteenth century, and the parallel changes in the production of type, ink and paper.

John Southward (1897) wrote at the end of the nineteenth century that letterpress printing could conveniently be divided into three main branches – jobbing, book and newspapers. While this was the case in the larger centres, such as London, and the larger provincial towns such as Birmingham, Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, in smaller centres they were often combined within a single business. By 1900 daily newspapers were produced using large printing machines operating at high speeds, which were physically on too large a scale to be accommodated in smaller general offices. These small print shops produced local weekly newspapers alongside general jobbing work undertaken for the local community and relied on machines which could be used for a broad range of print production, making the best use of the existing equipment and skills available within the business. By this stage, too, the workers in these different branches of the print trade worked to different patterns, and their scales of pay reflected this.