David John Chambers

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David John Chambers (born 1930) is an English bibliographer, printing historian, printer and book-collector. [1] Throughout a career in insurance, latterly as a non-marine underwriter for AS Harrison Syndicate 56 at Lloyd's of London, and more recently in retirement, Chambers has studied books and ephemera relating to printing, typography, book-illustration, private presses, the book-arts, English art and literature, and has published books and articles on a wide range of related subjects. Since 1979 he has edited, or co-edited, The Private Library, the quarterly journal of the Private Libraries Association, a bibliophile society of which he has been Chairman since the 1970s, and a Council member from the late 1950s.

Chambers has also compiled volumes of the Association's annual bibliography of Private press books, and has designed some of the publications of the Private Libraries Association and of the Bibliographical Society of London. His major work of recent years is a history and bibliography of British private presses before Kelmscott, being chiefly the privately run and amateur printing offices of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This work is currently in progress.

As a printer, Chambers has operated the Cuckoo Hill Press since the late 1950s, having made his first press himself. He printed a number of significant illustrated books in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but since that period has mostly confined his printing to ephemera and Christmas greetings. He has collected printing equipment and archives since the 1950s, with a special interest in wood-engraved blocks.

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  1. "David Chambers: early private printing" in A modest collection: Private Libraries Association 1956–2006 (Pinner: Private Libraries Association, 2007, pp. [144]–146).

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