Reading Room Press

Having enjoyed the wood engraved image for as long as he can remember and having ‘had a go’ himself Miles Wigfield bought an Albion press to print all the engravings he was going to engrave. However he’d never been much of an artist and his first acquisition of type – two full cases of 60pt & 72pt Caslon sold/given to him by John Randle of the Whittington Press –quickly turned his head to the pleasures and fascination of typography and the printing of type.

The Reading Room Press, named after the cottage where he lived at the time, began in 2002. Activities were resumed in 2010 after a move to the edge of the Gloucestershire village of Quenington and the building of a new press room. His main aspiration at the press is to publish – and print – items of literary interest particularly of his own literary heroes, so far Forrest Reid, A. S. J. Tessimond, and T. E. Lawrence. It has also been a pleasure to commission wood engravers to illustrate these publications: Jane Lydbury, Paul Kershaw, Ian Stephens and Jim Westergard to date. Celebratory broadsheets, family wedding invitations, and other ephemera are a rewarding aspect of Miles’s work..  

Collection