Printed Products

Over the cen­turies, the print­ing trade has called for many dif­fer­ent skills to pro­duce a huge range of sizes and types of mate­ri­als. In gen­er­al those that sur­vived from the ear­li­est peri­od were books which are pro­tect­ed by their bind­ings. How­ev­er, with the tech­ni­cal inno­va­tions and improve­ments from the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry on, and the process of indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion, the demand for print grew enor­mous­ly. As well as books of all shapes and sizes, and peri­od­i­cals and news­pa­pers, print­ed forms, posters, labels, tick­ets and invoic­es, togeth­er with all oth­er vari­eties of ephemera poured from small local presses.

Branch­es of the print­ing trade became spe­cialised, Label print­ing became a spe­cial­i­ty of lith­o­graph­ic print­ers such J & J Mur­doch of Glas­gow, and firms known for their exper­tise as engravers, such as Kirk­woods, also print­ed maps.