Printing Workers and the Print Trade, Then and Now

Printing has always been a skilled trade before it was ever an industry statistic — compositors, pressmen and printers who learned a craft, often over years, before machines and later computers changed what that craft involved.

A Trade Built on Skill

For most of print's history, producing anything — setting type by hand, running a press, binding a book — required years of trained skill. Print workers organised early and effectively, and the trade's strength came directly from how much technical knowledge each job actually required; you couldn't simply hire someone off the street to set a page of type correctly.

Technology Kept Changing the Job

Every major shift in printing technology — hot-metal Linotype typesetting, offset lithography, phototypesetting, and eventually digital and desktop publishing — changed what printing work actually involved, and how many people it took to do it. Each transition was disruptive for the trade, and each one, eventually, made printing faster, cheaper and more accessible to smaller operations than the one before it.

Where the Trade Sits Today

The UK printing industry is still overwhelmingly built from small, specialist operations: of the roughly 6,800 companies making up the sector, around three-quarters employ fewer than ten people. Large-scale industrial printing exists, but most of the trade today looks a lot more like a skilled workshop than a factory floor — closer, in spirit, to the individually trained printer of a century ago than to a mass-production plant.

Where We Fit In

We're part of that small-operation tradition ourselves — a husband-and-wife team printing in-house in Enfield, not a call centre routing your order to an anonymous factory. Every design is checked personally before it prints, which is really just the modern version of a skilled printer knowing their trade well enough to catch a mistake before it hits the press. Read more on our Our Story page.

Frequently asked questions

Why did printing workers organise so effectively historically?

Because the trade required real, hard-to-replace technical skill — setting type, running a press and binding correctly all took years to learn properly, which gave skilled workers genuine leverage.

How has printing technology changed the trade?

Each major shift, from hot-metal typesetting to offset litho to digital printing, changed what the job involved and how many people it took, generally making printing faster and more accessible to smaller operations over time.

Is most of the UK printing industry large or small businesses?

Overwhelmingly small — roughly three-quarters of the UK's approximately 6,800 print companies employ fewer than ten people.

The Printing House as a Community

In 1683 the printer Joseph Moxon described every printing house as, by custom "time out of mind", a chapel, and its oldest freeman as the father of the chapel. The word could mean the workshop itself or a meeting of its workers, and the chapel acted like a shop-level union: it settled disputes among journeymen and fined breaches of its own rules, with the fine called a solace. Where the term came from is argued over. Some trace it to William Caxton's shop near Westminster Abbey, while Moxon guessed it came from printers producing sacred texts. Whatever the origin, the vocabulary stuck: some printing unions were still calling their branches chapels centuries later.

Printers' Slang That Is Still in Use

The trade left its mark on everyday English. A printer's devil was the young boy who took sheets off the press and was usually covered in ink. A monk was a black blotch where too much ink had settled, and a friar a pale patch where the ink failed to reach the paper. Even if you have never visited a press, you may have used a phrase that began in a composing room. Terms like these are a reminder that print was learned inside a working shop, passed from one worker to the next.

Regulation Before Unions: The Stationers

Long before modern unions, the Stationers' Company of London received a royal charter in 1557 and held a monopoly over publishing until the Statute of Anne in 1710. Members recorded ownership of works in the Stationers' Register, and the company's officers could seize offending books. The company survives today as a City livery company, the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers. This was a trade that was supervised closely by the Crown for the simple reason that print could spread ideas.

Caxton and the First English Workshop

William Caxton set up his press at Westminster in 1476. He had already printed in Bruges, where the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye was produced in 1473, and his Westminster press, set up in 1476, is the first printing press recorded in England. In other words, English print started as a small shop, run by a few people, working to commission, which is not so far from how small print businesses still operate.

Machines and the Composing Room

The Linotype, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, was first installed commercially at the New York Tribune in July 1886. Instead of picking single letters, an operator typed on a keyboard and the machine cast a whole line of metal type. Hot metal remained the standard for mass printing from the late nineteenth century until phototypesetting and then electronic processes spread between the 1950s and 1980s. Each step shifted skill rather than removing it: the compositor became a keyboard operator, and later a designer working on a screen.

Wapping, 1986

The sharpest modern clash came in January 1986, when News International, Rupert Murdoch's company, moved production of its newspapers to a new plant at Wapping. The print unions struck and about 6,000 employees were dismissed. The strike collapsed on 5 February 1987. Wapping produced with about 670 printers what had taken 6,800 employees at the old plant, and by 1988 almost every national newspaper had left Fleet Street. Whatever view you take of the dispute, it marks the point where computerised typesetting rewrote the economics of the trade.

What Today's Print Skills Look Like

Modern production is much less visible but still skilled:

• Colour management, so a logo looks the same on screen, on paper and on fabric.
• File preparation: resolution, transparency, bleed, and fonts that behave.
• Material knowledge: which garment, ink and finish suit a given job.
• Quality control: spotting a mistake before the whole run is printed.

For garments, DTF printing separates these tasks. A design is printed onto film and then heat-pressed onto the garment, which is a different production route from the lead type of Moxon's day, but the questions are the same. Is the artwork ready? Is the proof right? Does the finished piece match what was promised? Our artwork and file preparation guide walks through the checks, and our DTF printing explained page covers the process.

Looking for Printing Work or Training Today

If you are interested in a career in print, the sensible route is to look at local college courses and apprenticeships, and at trade bodies such as the British Printing Industries Federation. Ask what parts of the work you would be doing: prepress, press operation, finishing, or customer service. We are not a training provider and cannot offer placements. If you simply want to understand what the person preparing your order does, the short version is that they check the artwork, the garment and the proof so that the printing stage goes smoothly, which is exactly the kind of judgement the old chapels prized in a good workman.

What was a printing chapel?

It was the workforce of a printing house, or a meeting of it, which settled disputes and enforced shop rules. Later some print unions used the word for their local branches.

When did English printing begin?

William Caxton set up a press at Westminster in 1476, after earlier printing in Bruges.

What was the Wapping dispute?

A strike that began in January 1986, after News International moved newspaper production to Wapping. About 6,000 employees were dismissed, and the strike ended in February 1987.