A hidden gem revealed: inside the Cambridge University Library’s Historical Printing Room

Recently, residents were treated to a rare and fascinating opportunity to explore one of Cambridge’s best-kept secrets – the Historical Printing Room – thanks to David and Sydney.

The Historical Printing Room is housed within the University Library (UL), which is one of just six legal deposit libraries for the UK. The UL holds around nine million items and receives a further 100,000 each year; in fact its collection is so extensive that it opened a vast storage facility in Ely in 2018, with over 100 kilometres of shelving.

Opened in 1934 and designed by Giles Gilbert Scott — the architect behind Battersea Power Station and Bankside Power Station (now Tate Modern) and the red telephone box — the UL is both a working library and an architectural landmark. In fact, the design of those famous phone boxes subtly reappears inside the library, echoed in the shape of its internal windows. Interestingly, the tower, now a defining feature of the Cambridge skyline, wasn’t part of Scott’s original plans but was added at the insistence of philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, who provided much of the project’s funding.

Despite the building’s grandeur, the entrance to the Historical Printing Room is surprisingly humble — tucked away behind the lockers and easy to miss if you don’t know where to look.

The Morison Historical Printing Room

Officially known as the Morison Historical Printing Room, it is named after Stanley Morison, an influential printing historian and typographer best known for designing the Times New Roman font. After his death in 1967, Morison’s personal library and papers (and even his desk, hat and briefcase) were donated to the University.

This inspired the creation of the Historical Printing Room in the early 1970s. The idea of printing rooms in libraries wasn’t new: the first was established at Yale in 1917, followed by Oxford, to help literature students understand how printing processes shaped the accuracy and appearance of texts.

In Cambridge, Philip Gaskell, Librarian of Trinity College, set up a small print shop using equipment sourced from various places. Later, the Engineering Department built a full-size replica of an 18th-century wooden hand press to his design.

By 1974, printing classes were underway — and they’ve continued ever since, celebrating their 50th anniversary last year. The eight-week course teaches students to produce a pamphlet, with four weeks spent just on setting type! Today, the course is led by David, a letterpress printer among other skills, who, along with Sydney, found a perfect outlet for their shared passion within the UL’s printing community.

Paper, type and presses

David introduced us to the three fundamental elements of printing: paper, type and presses.

Paper production, he explained, started in the Orient and reached Europe in the 15th century and Britain soon after. For centuries, it was made from linen and cotton rags, soaked and pounded into a pulp before being lifted from a vat using a paper mould — a mesh frame that strained out water – before being pressed and hung to dry. The mould David demonstrated, one of two from the William Morris archives acquired by the University Press in 1940, includes a decorative watermark pattern.

The year 1850 marked a turning point when wood fibre was introduced into paper production. Though cheaper and abundant, wood pulp’s high acidity meant that paper made this way deteriorated faster — the reason some old newspapers yellow and crumble with age.

When it comes to type, David showed us a composing stick, used to set individual letters by hand. Two type cases were arranged before the compositor: capitals in the upper case and small letters in the lower — giving us the familiar terms uppercase and lowercase. Lines of type were separated by thin strips of lead. Once set, text was proofed, but correcting errors was laborious, and deciding to “stop press” mid-run sometimes led to curious historical variations in surviving texts.

Before machine casting arrived in the 1830s, every letter was cast by hand. A matrix (bearing the letterform) was placed into a mould and molten lead poured in. The matrix itself was made using an engraved steel punch.

At the UL, research is currently underway on the Baskerville punches, made in the 1750s by printer John Baskerville. These were donated to the Library in the 1980s by the Cambridge University Press, which held one of the finest collections of historical printing materials. After Baskerville’s death, the punches were purchased by Beaumarchais and taken to France, where they were used to print, among other works, a complete edition of Voltaire’s writings.

Sydney also highlighted the often-overlooked role of women in printing history — noting that wives and children frequently worked alongside men in family print shops, though their contributions were rarely recorded.

Printing in action

We then moved on to the presses themselves. David demonstrated Gaskell’s wooden Common press, modelled on an 18th-century design, alongside several later iron handpresses. Some used intricate counterweights — including one American example shaped like an eagle — to help lift the platen after making an impression.

He also showed us a clamshell press, a smaller, automatic-inking design once used in village print shops for everyday forms such as prescription pads. The UL itself used one for decades to print library borrowing slips.

Printing ink, David explained, is made from boiled linseed oil mixed with lamp black, resulting in a thick, sticky substance quite unlike pen ink. While printers once cleaned their equipment with turpentine or gasoline, today they use white spirit.

Fifty years of printing passion

The Historical Printing Room’s course is as popular as ever and has a sizeable waiting list. Its participants range from undergraduates and postdocs to rare book experts and librarians.

Thanks to David and Sydney, we were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at this living workshop of printing history — an extraordinary reminder that the story of the book is not just written in ink, but pressed into paper by hand, with care, craft and characters!