Presses for printing
Exhibits at the British Library
You can find out about the early history of printing in the free exhibitions at the British Library.
Printing exhibits at the Library include a working replica of an 18th-century printing press.
Also on display is the only surviving press used to print the first postage stamps. The press printed the Penny Black and Two Pence Blue from May 1840. It went on printing British stamps until 1870. In its time it was a high-speed printer able to produced 240 stamps to a sheet.
Another exhibit is a Monotype keyboard. Operators worked at the keyboard to start the process to produce type from molten metal. Keying in the text produced a spool of paper perforated with small holes like a piano roll. This reel of paper was in effect a coded message which programmed the casting unit to make the thousands of individual letters and spaces in lines of type from molten metal.
Submitted by: Andrew Hunt, 20 January 2007
