The Bodleian Library
Environment
The Bodleian's workshop has benefitted from the long history of book printing and book-collecting in the city and the University of Oxford. A very tangible legacy from the Oxford University Press are the seventeenth-century wooden composing frames that are still used at the Bibliographical Press. The intangible benefits of the expertise and knowledge about book production fostered by OUP is another part of the local ecosystem in which the Bodleian Bibliographical Press has grown.
A notable individual key to the founding of the Bodleian's Bibliography Room in the mid-twentieth century was Strickland Gibson, employee of the Bodleian including in the post of Sub-Librarian from 1931 to 1945, lecturer in Bibliography in the English Faculty at Oxford from 1923, and a collector of specimens of printing history which, to this day, are invaluable as teaching aids for demonstrating aspects of print production from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. They can be found in the Bodleian's online catalogue under the shelfmark 'Gibson'.
The Bibliographical Press is part of the Bodleian’s Department of Special Collections, and the activities of the press are inspired by the Library’s collections of early printing, artists’ books and printed ephemera, the last being strongly represented in the John Johnson Collection, begun by and named after the former Printer to the University from 1925 to 1946.
The Oxford Bibliographical Society and the student equivalent, the Oxford Society of Bibliophiles, are groups with an interest in promoting and spreading appreciation of early books. The skills of individuals who run private presses at home, including members of the Oxford Guild of Printers, supply the Bodleian workshop with expertise for teaching and demonstrating the presses.
