Workers in a Type Foundry, ca. 1910

Workers in a Type Foundry, ca. 1910

Metal

This unattributed photograph of the interior of a type foundry, which is possibly in London but would have been much the same as those found in Edinburgh, including the firm of Miller & Richards in Chapel Street, shows men and women in the casting shop, with men casting the letters and women dressing the type of excess metal. The men, with their dirty aprons, are stood alongside hot and complex machines where the lead type is cast, whilst the women workers are seated for the less skilled work in a cooler position by the windows.

Type founding – the process of making the individual letters that are put together by compositors to make a page of text - began in Scotland with the Glasgow works of Alexander Wilson, who in the 1770s was responsible for the types used by the Foulis Press in the production of beautiful editions of the classics under the patronage of Glasgow University. The punch cutters and engravers who first worked in Scotland were mostly trained in London, but by c.1800 Wilson also employed a number of Scottish craftsmen including William Miller, his foreman, who set up his own business in Edinburgh in 1808. Miller joined with his son-in-law, Walter Richard, in 1842 and the firm of Miller & Richard of 65 Nicholson Street close to the University of Edinburgh, became the largest in Scotland employing over 500 ‘men and boys’ by the 1860s.

Metal type was made from a mix of lead, tin and antimony. Before type could be made, however, the first operation was to cut a set of punches in fine steel, which was the most skilled element of the type making process. Many punch cutters were self-employed craftsmen who worked for a number of firms and some of those responsible for the finest typefaces produced in Scotland were London based. In addition to the punchers and type founders, a typical type foundry in the mid nineteenth century would also employ skilled craftsmen to make the wooden and brass frame-work or ‘furniture’ for setting the types.

Skilled women were long associated with the book and paper trades, though they were never as well paid as men. Type dressing, sorting and packing was one area of work and also book sewing and cloth binding. Leather binding was normally viewed as a male skill. In a city famed for its publishing and printing houses, women were employed as compositors in Edinburgh from the later nineteenth century, having a higher ratio of women to men in the industry (c.1:10) than in any other city in Britain. A heavily unionised industry, the Scottish Typographical Society formed in 1853 had c.6,500 members at its height. Yet the history of the book trades, with its type foundries, printers, publishers and ancillary trades such as engravers, illustrators and binders, was one of slowly diminishing craft identity, as new technologies undermined old skills.

Though it was for many years one of the key employment sectors in Edinburgh the letter press industry largely ended in the 1960s following the wide adoption of offset lithography. The firm of Miller & Richards ceased trading in 1951 and the premises were demolished – a fate that befell most of the workshop premises that once accommodated Edinburgh’s large craft economy in this part of the city. The site that was once occupied by the type foundry is now the location for the Central Edinburgh Mosque.

Napier University

Napier University