Medical Hall Press

Medical Hall Press was a publishing house based in Benares, India in the nineteenth century, during which it was the city's foremost press. ^[1] It published Sanskrit philosophical literature ^[2] and plays, including Jayadeva's Prasannaraghava and Rajashekhara's Balaramayana ^[1] . It also published Hindi writer Premchand's now-lost novel 1907 Kishna. ^[3] Its secondary literature includes reference material like textbooks in Hindi and English, which were translated to Urdu, ^{[1] [4]} as well as dictionaries. The press also published missionary literature ^[5] as well as colonial photography ^[6] and scholarship, including Frederic Growse's Bulandshahr: Or, Sketches of an Indian District.

The press had fonts for various scripts, including Devanagari, Latin script, Arabic, and Urdu. ^[7]

Medical Hall Press, founded by E.J. Lazarus in 1854, ^[8] is also known as E.J. Lazarus & Co. ^[6] It was one of three European-owned printing presses in nineteenth-century colonial India. ^[8] It operated until at least the 1920s. ^[6]

References

1. Orsini, Francesca (26 June 2004). "Pandits, Printers and Others: Publishing in nineteenth-century Benares". Permanent Black. pp. 103–138.
2. "Shri Narayan Kavyam 1897 Medical Hall Press Kashi".
3. Gupta, Prakash Chandra (2010). Prem Chand (Repr ed.). New Delhi: Sahitya Akad. ISBN   9788126024285.
4. "All writings of Medical Hall Press, Banaras". Rekhta.
5. Lorbeer, H. (1882). "Memoirs of Rev. W. Ziemann: founder and missionary of the Ghazipur Mission". Medical Hall Press.
6. "(#341) Benares--E.J. Lazarus & Co". Sothebys.com.
7. Stark, Ulrike (1998). 'Inside a nineteenth-century publishing house: The Newal Kishore Press in Lucknow as a new kind of literary and intellectual centre', unpubl. paper, presented at the 15th European Conference on Modern South Asian Studies, Prague, Sept 1998. cited in Pandits and Printers
8. Sahani, Santosh Kumar. "Emergence of the Local Print Culture in Banaras, 1800-1900".