William martin was brother to Robert Martin, Baskerville's apprentice and successor. He appears to have acquired his first knowledge of the art at the Birmingham foundry, and about the year 1786 to have come to London and entered into the service of Mr. George Nicol, as a punch cutter. Mr. Nicol was at that time engaged in maturing his plans for the production of a magnificent edition of Shakespeare, and kept Martin at his own house “to cut sets of types after approved models in imitation of the sharp and fine letter used by the French and Italian printers.”

On the establishment of the famous “Shakespeare Press,” by Messrs. Boydell and Nicol, in 1790, at Cleveland Row, St. James's, with William Bulmer as presiding genius, Martin was established in premises hard by, in Duke Street; his foundry being a sort of private foundry in connection with the Press. Here it was that he produced the founts in which the magnificent works, issued during the next twenty years from Bulmer's Press, were printed.

The appearance of the first part of the Shakespeare in 1791 at once established the fame of the printer and his types; and the completion of the work, in nine volumes, in 1810, may be regarded as marking an epoch in British typography. “No work of equal magnitude”, says the enthusiastic Dibdin, “ever presented such complete accuracy and uniform excellence of execution.