Extending the reach of our printing presses research

In February 2025, we supported London’s oldest Church, St Bartholomew the Great, with its 300^th anniversary celebration of Benjamin Franklin’s first visit to London. Since the Reformation, the Lady Chapel of the Church had been partitioned off, and in 1725 it housed the workshop of master printer Samuel Palmer.  It was here that Benjamin Franklin, who had been an apprentice in the printing trade in America since the age of 12, found employment as a compositor.

The type of press Franklin would have worked on is called a “Common Press” and we were able to provide St Bartholow’s with a research-led reconstruction of a Common Press, made by Alan May in 2011 and which is now part of the Historic Press Workshop in the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication that is used for research and teaching.

We worked with colleagues from the letterpress workshop in the Old Bodleian Library, Oxford to support visitors to the Church in learning about the printing press and Franklin through demonstrations by expert printers.

Visitors included groups of 20 to 30 people ranging from students to pensioners including Institute of English Studies, UCL Library Studies students, King’s College London, Warburg Institute, PG Wodehouse Society, Georgian Group, Daughters of the American Revolution, Athenaeum Library Committee Group, London Historians, Royal College of Arms.  In addition, there were small groups of auctioneers, academics and curators from: The British Library, Shakespeare’s Globe, Sotheby’s, Christie’s, King’s Special Collections, Queen Mary, Kent, School of Advanced Studies, Middle Temple Library, Inner Temple Library, Royal Society Archives, Senate House Library, Stationers’ Company Archives, Benjamin Franklin House.