Over the years a network of letterpress engineers, suppliers, printers, customers and museums has developed to run almost in parallel to the mainstream printing industry. They all seem to know each other and their activities often overlap.
Josiah Wade Ltd is part of a group of cooperating businesses that handle the refurbishment, supply and moving of hand and foot-treadle operated letterpress presses. The various team members travel the country, moving, servicing, repairing and modifying letterpress and printmaking machinery of all sorts, mostly 50 years old and sometimes a lot more.
While most of the customers and applications are the type you’d expect for old presses, there are occasions when they reach a much larger audience, as working props in movies or demonstrations in historic documentaries.
Until recently the main company was called AMR Logan, primarily run by Patrick Roe and Giles Hovendon, and activities also included traditional hand bookbinding. AMR Logan came about as a result of a 2018 merger of the businesses of Roe’s The Logan Press, which specialised in the refurbishment of hand-fed platens and owned a traditional book bindery; and Hovendon’s AMR, which specialised in heavy old hand-pulled iron presses and developed the capability for moving and installing them.
When the bindery was reluctantly closed in July this year, AMR Logan was also closed but its sales and coordination activities were continued by Josiah Wade Ltd, working with the same group of specialists. “Josiah Wade Ltd was registered a few years ago and now it is more of a cooperation of the people who used to work for AMR Logan Press,” explains Roe.
The reorganisation now sees three separate companies working together. Josiah Wade Ltd handles overall letterpress and printmaking sales, service and removals and installations. Jim Kellett’s Letterpress Restorations in Woodford, Northants, took over everything to do with Arab presses. Richard Hemingway runs a forge west of Halifax that makes parts as needed. Josiah Wade’s Melanie Hollin looks after administration and coordinates activities between forge, workshop, storage, moving and site visits.
Specialist edition bookbinding customers are directed to Smith Settle Printing & Bookbinding in Yeadon, Leeds, which bought some of the kit from the AMR Logan bindery.
Platen passion
Running through this somewhat unusually fragmented Best of British, is the 50-year story of Patrick Roe and his career-long passion for both the Arab treadle-operated platen press and the history of its inventor and maker, Josiah Wade (1842-1908). Built in Halifax between 1872 and 1959, these hand-fed, non-motorised letterpress machines became ubiquitous throughout the UK and sold all over the world as what Roe describes as the “best-designed, best-made and easiest to transport jobbing platens.”
In 1975, Roe was a schoolboy in Durham when he was given a broken Arab press by the local university. This kickstarted a lifelong fascination with the presses and their inventor. The Arab press was soon mended and Roe spent his free time printing booklets, posters and stationery. He was included in an exhibition of private presses in Durham University Library.
After school Roe signed up with the London College of Printing, but after only a year he decided to set up his own printers’ supply company, Glevum Graphics in Gloucester, specialising in moving, restoring, buying and selling Arabs as well as offering design, typesetting and letterpress printing.
Over the years he’s always remained close to his original interest. Indeed, Roe has been researching a book about Josiah Wade and Arab presses for 50 years now. He’s in no hurry to finish it: “To me the research is the most interesting part,” he says.
A highlight came in 2018 with the opportunity to rent Josiah Wade’s 1903 office in his Dunkirk Mills factory in Halifax, for a few years. “It was a pure indulgence because it was Josiah Wade’s actual office,” says Roe. “When I was researching the book, I found that Dunkirk Mills was being refurbished as office space. So I spoke to the owner, a lovely chap called Ben Shaw. He liked the connection with Josiah Wade and said that his company, Vandalite, would move out of Josiah’s old office and that I could move in for a small rent.”
Day-to-day operations are now handled from Roe’s home in Islip, Northants, with workshops in his garden, while customers and suppliers mostly go to a separate office in Halifax.
Fine binding
In 2007 Roe and his partner Frances Fineran were operating as the Logan Press, named after Roe’s grandmother’s maiden name. The owners of The Fine Bindery in Wellingborough were thinking of closing their hand book binding business, and hoping the Logan Press, might take it on.
The Fine Bindery had an excellent reputation and bound limited editions for most of the private presses in the UK, with the highly skilled workforce using traditional methods and materials such as leather, cloth and vellum.
One customer was The Folio Society, which was producing a series called The Letterpress Shakespeare. In 2017 The Logan Press bindery featured in a 2017 coffee table book celebrating Britain’s traditional crafts and industries, Crafted in Britain: The Survival of Britain’s Traditional Industries – it’s still available at £17.50 from Bloomsbury.
“Sadly, the demand for this sort of work has diminished greatly and the craftspeople able to produce it have retired or are no longer with us,” Roe says. “So last summer, the doors of the bindery were closed for the final time, with the nipping presses, book sewing machine, spine backing machine, etc being sold off.”
Heavy metal movements
The AMR part of AMR Logan was created by Giles Hovendon. He was born in Halifax but grew up in Cumbria, where he helped out at the Printing House Museum at Cockermouth. He started working with Jeremy Winkworth under the name of AMR. They specialised in 19th century iron-framed hand presses such as Stanhope, Columbian and Albion, as well as etching presses and other printmaking equipment.
Roe and Hovendon worked together over the years and decided to join forces, given their unrivalled experience with older letterpress and printmaking equipment. So they became AMR Logan Press in 2020.
One of the first jobs they took on together was to relocate a rare five-colour gravure textile press, from the top floor of the National Trust’s huge Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, to the Science Museum’s storage unit in Swindon. It was made by William and Collin Mather of Salford between 1824 and 1852.
Also for the National Trust, they recently moved a large Cropper platen once used by Virginia Wolfe in her tower at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. It had to go down the small winding tower staircase to another building on the site. The process was filmed and is due to appear in a forthcoming TV series about the National Trust.
The Arab press restoration side of the business had been handled for years by Guy Brudenell. This work has now been transferred to his own new company, Letterpress Restorations, in Woodford, Northants. He offers restoration and parts for the Arab presses.
With antique and very old machines, inevitably replacement parts are no longer available. A few years ago Richard Hemingway joined the team. He has his own forge, just west of Halifax, and takes on much of the engineering work needed.
Stars of large and small screens
An increasing part of the business has been the supply of old and antique printing machinery to movie makers. In 2011, the team took an 1890s Cropper Minerva platen press to Shepperton film studios to appear alongside Robert Downey Jnr and Jude Law in Sherlock Holmes 2: A Game of Shadows.
They twice took one of the earliest iron hand presses, a Stanhope, to the film set for the Regency alternative history romp Bridgerton. They also installed a 1920s Arab on a set where it was being used by the British Union of Fascists in Outrageous, a forthcoming film about the Mitford sisters. Recently they supplied a 1940s Vicobold art platen for the Peaky Blinders movie, The Immortal Man for Netflix.
Over the past summer, Hovendon and Roe refurbished and moved 12 letterpress machines for Reading University, including the reproduction of a wooden ‘common press’ built for the excellent 2008 BBC documentary Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press.
Letterpress Today
Since 2020 the company has produced three issues of an occasional journal called Letterpress Today, covering all aspects of letterpress and printmaking. These can be ordered from www.letterpress.today. Although mostly about AMR Logan Press and Josiah Wade, they include pages on The British Printing Society, The Fine Press Book Fair, The Oxford Guild of Printers, and typographer John Ryder, as well as articles about printers.
