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Title: Women in Print 1

Women in Print 1

Design and Identities

by Artemis Alexiou (Volume editor) Rose Roberto (Volume editor)
©2022 Edited Collection XVI, 304 Pages
History & Political Science
Series: Printing History and Culture, Volume 2

Summary

Women in Print is a collection of essays in two related volumes which considers the diversity of roles occupied by women in the design, authorship, production, distribution and consumption of printed material from the thirteenth century onwards.
　
Women in Print I: Design and Identities demonstrates women’s multi-layered contribution to design, printing and publishing history through eleven case studies of women artists, compositors, editors, engravers, photographers, printers, publishers, scribes, stationers, typesetters, widows in business, and writers. It offers an examination of women as active participants and contributors in the many and varied aspects of design and print culture, including the production of illustrations, typefaces, periodical layouts, photographic prints and bound volumes.
　
Women have often participated in design and print culture throughout history, yet their impact has typically been neglected and undervalued, or deliberately obscured from historical accounts. This collection of essays covers, and recovers, the lives and work of women in print, emphasizing how their contributions brought positive change not only to the industries they contributed to, but also to the wider social and cultural settings of their time.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • About the editors
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables
  • Acknowledgements
  • Introduction (Artemis Alexiou and Rose Roberto)
  • 1 Women’s Contribution to Manuscript Textbook Production in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Bologna (Rosa Smurra)
  • 2 Elizabeth Newbery, Publisher and Bookseller, 1780–1821: A Case Study from the Women’s Print History Project (Reese Alexandra Irwin)
  • 3 Letitia Byrne (1779–1849) and the ‘Prejudice Against Employing Women as Engravers’ (Hannah Lyons)
  • 4 The Olive Branch and Female Compositors, Writers and Editors, 1836–57 (Dianne Roman)
  • 5 ‘Choice Type’ and ‘Elegant Founts’: Advertising in Elizabeth Heard’s Truro Printing Office (Patricia Thomas)
  • 6 Examples of Art Workmanship: The Victoria and Albert Museum’s Educational Publishing Initiative and Its Female Institutional Photographer (Erika Lederman)
  • 7 Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical Texts and Paratexts: The Women’s Penny Paper/Woman’s Herald (1888–92) (Artemis Alexiou)
  • 8 Elizabeth Corbet Yeats: Dun Emer and Cuala Presses and Irish ‘Art Printing’, 1903–40 (Angela Griffith)
  • 9 Suffragettes: Radical Design in Action, 1903–30 (Anil Aykan Barnbrook)
  • 10 ‘The Woman Thoroughly Dominates’: Lene Schneider-Kainer (1885–1971) and Weimar Lesbian Erotica (Abbey Rees-Hales)
  • 11 Beatrice Warde, May Lamberton Becker and ‘Books Across the Sea’ (Jessica Glaser)
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index
  • Series index

Patricia Thomas

5 ‘Choice Type’ and ‘Elegant Founts’: Advertising in Elizabeth Heard’s Truro Printing Office

On 13 June 1823 The West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser printed the following notice from its publisher’s widow:

Elizabeth Heard … deeply sensible of the very liberal patronage conferred on her lamented husband, returns her most grateful acknowledgements to his Friends and to the Public at large, for the numerous favours already bestowed; and begs to state, that it is her intention to continue the Business, as it was carried on by her late Husband. [She] most respectfully assures those who may honour her with their commands, that the most unwearied assiduity, and the most unremitted attention shall be employed to give that satisfaction which gratitude and the interest of her infant family equally require it should be her aim to afford.1

Recent studies of historical business demonstrate that nineteenth-century middle-class women like Elizabeth were not inevitably the gendered domestic stereotypes they were once thought to have been, nor was the work they engaged in restricted to the so-called feminine trades.2 Widowhood was the entry point into business for many women. Numerous widows in the eighteenth century ‘stepped [seamlessly]’ into their husband’s shoes and Elizabeth seems to have followed that practice in the nineteenth century.3 Her husband John Heard had died on 18 May 1823, just three ←111 | 112→weeks prior to the notice above. He left ‘the amiable widow’ with four children under the age of ten and a business, all of which resided in and operated out of the premises at 30 Boscawen Street, Truro.4 She spent the following forty-five years living up to her statement of intent towards her clients, her family and the public of Cornwall. That she chose to continue in the business she inherited and conducted it ‘with eminent success’ is testament to her talents as a shrewd and capable businesswoman.5 That she was said to have done so for ‘close upon sixty years’ suggests that her involvement in the business prior to her husband’s death was substantial.6

I first encountered Elizabeth’s work in pursuit of a small handbill in the Courtney Library at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro. Since then I have done considerable sleuthing in the Library archives and, while Elizabeth remains in many ways a spectral figure to me, additional investigative legwork will serve to bring her work more fully into the light. Meanwhile, this chapter offers glimpses of her contribution to the business of printing in the nineteenth century.

Contexts, Archival Source and Outline

This study of Elizabeth’s printing office sits within the contexts of research on provincial printing and the analysis of typographical form. Scholars have recently paid a ‘great deal of attention’ to provincial printing ←112 | 113→businesses in the late 1700s and into the 1800s.7 This chapter adds to the more recent research on non-metropolitan printers by historians who take the study of printing practices away from the urban centres, into the provinces and beyond them into the empire. David Osbaldestin and Diana Mackarill’s individual research on the Gitton family at Bridgnorth and Rob Banham’s study of the printers Guy & Balne situate this research on Elizabeth’s printing house within the context of family businesses.8 However, none of these examine Cornish printers and, as John Hinks notes, few studies investigate women’s printing practices.9 To reinstate women in the narratives of printing history, this chapter more specifically builds on the work of print culture and family businesses undertaken by historian Hannah Barker. Barker’s research on women in printing provides a model for the study of working women ‘towards the upper end of the scale’, in other words, women of property such as Elizabeth Heard.10 ←113 | 114→Many of the women that Barker names in her list of widows or daughters, however, operated as printing house proprietors either in London or other larger centres, rather than in the counties, like Cornwall.11 Moreover, with the notable exception of Osbaldestin, few studies of historical printing offices address the specifics tools – the type designs and typography – of the advertising material produced in them.

While this chapter examines the advertisements printed at the Heard printing office, it does not focus specifically on advertising practice per se. Rather, typefaces and typography form the basis of and provide a lens through which to analyse examples of advertising. This analysis draws on mid-twentieth century studies by printing historians. Among these are Nicolete Gray, P. M. Handover and Ruari McLean who explore the ideas and events that gave rise ‘suddenly and without warning’ to the aesthetic innovations in early nineteenth-century type designs.12 As foundational studies they remain invaluable to research the typefaces themselves and their practical application in individual printing offices. Particularly relevant to some of the typefaces described in this chapter was the typographic historian James Mosley’s identification in 1966 of a series of highly decorated wooden letters from the foundry of Louis John Pouchée. Mosley was able to confirm their provenance when, in 1988, he discovered a type specimen book of the idiosyncratic founder.13

Details

Pages
XVI, 304
Publication Year
2022
ISBN (PDF)
9781800798427
ISBN (ePUB)
9781800798434
ISBN (Softcover)
9781789979787
DOI
10.3726/b19677
Language
English
Publication date
2022 (November)
Keywords
Design Publishing Women Women in Print Artemis Alexiou Rose Roberto
Published
Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, 2022. XVI, 304 pp., 40 fig. b/w, 2 tables.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Artemis Alexiou (Volume editor) Rose Roberto (Volume editor)

Artemis Alexiou (Volume Editor) is a Senior Lecturer in Design Studies and Design History at York St John University, UK. She has taught at Manchester School of Art and other HE institutions since 2013. She studied architecture at Oxford Brookes University and graphic design at London Metropolitan University. She holds an AHRC-funded PhD in design, media and women’s history by the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design, Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research concentrates on late nineteenth-century feminist periodicals, especially to the manner in which texts and paratexts (mainly design, visual and material) co-functioned in relation to gender politics, and other intersecting concepts such as class and ethnicity. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow of the HEA. Rose Roberto (Volume Editor) is a part-time Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Teaching Resources Librarian at Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK. She studied Library and Information Science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and history of the book at the University of Reading. Her current research examines the intersection of visual culture and educational publishing, and the hidden histories related to race, gender and class embedded in the material culture of the transnational book trade during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She was series editor for the Art Researchers’ Guides to different cities in the UK and Ireland (2011–2017), and a contributor to the award-winning Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Vol. 2 (Finkelstein, 2020), and Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century (Delamaire and Slauter, 2021). She is a Fellow of the HEA.

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Title: Women in Print 1