1904

The first press

“Took the Wharfedale on twelve months’ credit and printed the receipt for it myself, which the agent said was the first time a customer had done that.”

Arthur Hollis, daybook, March 1904

The works began as one flatbed press in a yard off Arundel Street, with the daybook kept on the stone beside it. The first year’s ledger is mostly tickets, handbills and the receipt above, and by the end of it there were two apprentices and a second-hand guillotine that is still, with new blades, the one in use.

1931

Handbills for the pictures

“Your man delivered four hundred bills at seven this morning and stayed to see the first house go in, which is more than the film did.”

J. Ambler, manager, the Lyceum Picture House, 1931

Through the twenties and thirties the yard printed for every cinema, chapel and football ground within a tram ride, the bills going out overnight on a handcart and later on a van bought from the receiver of a rival. The type cases from that decade are the ones the training days use now; the sans in them was bought new in 1928 and has never been sold.

Part two

The mill

In 1947 the works moved out of the yard and into the ground floor of a disused grinding mill on the river, taking the presses, the type, the guillotine and the daybook. The mill is where everybody living remembers it, and everything below was printed there.

1958

The offset machine

“Mr Hollis stood by the Heidelberg for a full week without touching it, then on the Friday he printed the parish magazine on it and went home early.”

Notebook of a first-year apprentice, 1958

Offset arrived late and warily. The first machine ran beside the letterpress for eleven years rather than replacing it, taking the long runs and leaving the short ones to the type, which is roughly the division the works still keeps. The apprentice who kept the notebook retired as the foreman in 1994.

1979

The last hot metal

“We set the Christmas cards by hand because the Linotype had gone that morning, and nobody said anything, and they were the best cards we ever did.”

Margaret Hollis, compositor, December 1979

The Linotype went for scrap in the winter of 1979 and the mill went quiet for about a year. What came back was the hand-set work: cards, wedding stationery, the labels for a distillery that is still a customer, all of it slower and all of it, as Margaret put it, worth looking at. She ran the works for the next twenty-two years.

Part three

The screen

Two generations later the same room holds a proof press from 1912, a digital press from last year and a website that the family argued about for a decade. The last two chapters are about the argument, and about who won it.

2003

A website, reluctantly

“I built it on a Sunday so that nobody could stop me, and by Wednesday we had an order from Norway for a hundred hand-set menus.”

Ruth Hollis, 2003

The website was a single page with a telephone number on it and a photograph of the Heidelberg, and it did in a week what forty years of handbills had never managed: it brought in work from people who had never seen the mill. The page has been redesigned four times since and the photograph has never been changed.

2024

Letterpress again

“I came for a business card and stayed for the afternoon. You can feel the letters on the paper. Nothing I own does that.”

A customer, visitors’ book, 2024

The mill now prints for people who have chosen it on purpose: a hundred and twenty years in, the slow presses are the reason to come rather than the reason to leave. Open days run on the first Saturday of the month, the apprentices set their names in the 1928 sans, and the daybook, on its third volume, is still kept on the stone beside the press.