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.