Industry | Printing |
---|---|
Founded | 1839 |
Defunct | 2005 |
Fate | Acquired |
Successor | Maxwell Communications Corporation and Polestar |
Headquarters | London, UK |
Purnell and Sons started out as a small family printers based in Somerset which merged with other printers over the next 100 years to become one of the largest print groups in the UK and at one time a major publisher.
The company was founded by Charles Dando Purnell in 1839 as a small family printers with small print shops in Radstock, Midsomer Norton and Paulton. [1] With the influence of Wilfred Harvey, who was originally the firm's accountant, Purnell & Sons grew from the 1920s onwards, with letterpress printing being added as well as a lithography department in the late 1930s. The company grew to become a major concern that published and printed millions of colour books and magazines. In 1940, Purnell took control of book publisher MacDonald. [2]
In 1966 Purnell & Sons printed the popular and successful Purnell's History of the Second World War partwork series of magazines. In the 1960s and 1970s the company also published other partwork series including Knowledge (1962), Discovering Art (1964–66), The Masters (1965), Man, Myth and Magic (1970), Discovering Antiques (1970), A History of the English Speaking Peoples (1971), and History of the Twentieth Century (1968). The latest issues in these series would offered for sale every week or fortnight in newsagents across the world and were sold in large numbers (for example, 400,000 copies of Knowledge were printed). [3]
With the profits made by the letterpress and lithography parts of the firm, a purpose built gravure factory was added in the early 1960s, equipped with Cerutti presses with pre-press and printing cylinder production manufactured in-house by Bristol Photo Engraving (BPE).
At its peak employing 2,000 people [1] and at one stage being one of Europe's largest print plants, Purnell group of companies merged with Hazell Sun to form the British Printing Corporation in 1964. [4] In 1981 Robert Maxwell, the then owner of BPC closed the letterpress department, ink factory and much reduced the Lithography department, with the loss of 800 staff.
From 1981 to final closure saw a steady decline in the once large print company and major local employer. A five-month union dispute in the gravure plant against Robert Maxwell occurred in 1986. The web offset department was closed in 1989, and all book production stopped in 1996. Many former employees had their pensions affected by the Robert Maxwell pension scandal. [5]
The gravure plant printed many glossy Sunday colour newspaper supplements such as the Observer and the Sunday Times, catalogues such as the IKEA and of Argos, holiday brochures such as those of Cosmos Holidays and weekly magazines such as Woman's Own , Radio Times and the original UK edition of Grazia . Purnell remained faithful to web fed Cerutti presses, either 2.2m or 2.4m paper width. The final 2.4m Cerutti press was installed in 2001, which replaced an older machine, it could produce 72 A4 pages per impression, had a run speed of 50,000iph with inline stitching, with a crew of three printers and two assistants.
Other than one new press, Purnell suffered from under investment in both plant and equipment. Although the staff continued to produce high quality work on ageing presses and printing cylinder production equipment, in the end the Polestar print group opted to build a brand new plant in Sheffield. With some of the staff relocating to help set of the new plant, the print works in Paulton finally closed in December 2005 with the loss of 400 jobs. [6]
Lithography is a planographic method of printing originally based on the immiscibility of oil and water. The printing is from a stone or a metal plate with a smooth surface. It was invented in 1796 by the German author and actor Alois Senefelder and was initially used mostly for musical scores and maps. Lithography can be used to print text or images onto paper or other suitable material. A lithograph is something printed by lithography, but this term is only used for fine art prints and some other, mostly older, types of printed matter, not for those made by modern commercial lithography.
Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The earliest known form of printing evolved from ink rubbings made on paper or cloth from texts on stone tablets, used during the sixth century. Printing by pressing an inked image onto paper appeared later that century. Later developments in printing technology include the movable type invented by Bi Sheng around 1040 and the printing press invented by Johannes Gutenberg in the 15th century. The technology of printing played a key role in the development of the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution and laid the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.
A rotary printing press is a printing press in which the images to be printed are curved around a cylinder. Printing can be done on various substrates, including paper, cardboard, and plastic. Substrates can be sheet feed or unwound on a continuous roll through the press to be printed and further modified if required. Printing presses that use continuous rolls are sometimes referred to as "web presses".
Digital printing is a method of printing from a digital-based image directly to a variety of media. It usually refers to professional printing where small-run jobs from desktop publishing and other digital sources are printed using large-format and/or high-volume laser or inkjet printers.
Offset printing is a common printing technique in which the inked image is transferred from a plate to a rubber blanket and then to the printing surface. When used in combination with the lithographic process, which is based on the repulsion of oil and water, the offset technique employs a flat (planographic) image carrier. Ink rollers transfer ink to the image areas of the image carrier, while a water roller applies a water-based film to the non-image areas.
Letterpress printing is a technique of relief printing for producing many copies by repeated direct impression of an inked, raised surface against individual sheets of paper or a continuous roll of paper. A worker composes and locks movable type into the "bed" or "chase" of a press, inks it, and presses paper against it to transfer the ink from the type, which creates an impression on the paper.
Chromolithography is a method for making multi-colour prints. This type of colour printing stemmed from the process of lithography, and includes all types of lithography that are printed in colour. When chromolithography is used to reproduce photographs, the term photochrome is frequently used. Lithography is a method of printing on flat surfaces using a flat printing plate instead of raised relief or recessed intaglio techniques.
Rotogravure is a type of intaglio printing process, which involves engraving the image onto an image carrier. In gravure printing, the image is engraved onto a cylinder because, like offset printing and flexography, it uses a rotary printing press.
Photogravure is a process for printing photographs, also sometimes used for reproductive intaglio printmaking. It is a photo-mechanical process whereby a copper plate is grained and then coated with a light-sensitive gelatin tissue which had been exposed to a film positive, and then etched, resulting in a high quality intaglio plate that can reproduce detailed continuous tones of a photograph.
A wedding invitation is a letter asking the recipient to attend a wedding. It is typically written in the formal, third-person language and mailed five to eight weeks before the wedding date.
A partwork is a written publication released as a series of planned magazine-like issues over a period of time. Issues are typically released on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis, and often a completed set is designed to form a reference work on a particular topic.
Paulton is a large village and civil parish, with a population of 5,302, located to the north of the Mendip Hills, very close to Norton Radstock in the unitary authority of Bath and North East Somerset (BANES), England.
Manroland AG manufactures newspaper web offset presses, commercial web offset presses, and sheetfed offset presses for commercial, publications and packaging printing.
A photo book or photobook is a book in which photographs make a significant contribution to the overall content. A photo book is related to and also often used as a coffee table book.
Nuffield Press was a publisher and printer formed by William Morris as part of his Nuffield Organization in 1925. It was formed to primarily produce promotional literature for the motor vehicle manufacturing divisions of the organization, and later expanded to printing of all types including owner's manuals, technical manuals, magazines, diaries, and posters.
A jobbing press, job press, or jobber is a variety of printing press used in letterpress printing.
Gale and Polden was a British printer and publisher. Founded in Brompton, near Chatham, Kent in 1868, the business subsequently moved to Aldershot, where they were based until closure in November 1981 after the company had been bought by media mogul Robert Maxwell.
Print design, a subset of graphic design, is a form of visual communication used to convey information to an audience through intentional aesthetic design printed on a tangible surface, designed to be printed on paper, as opposed to presented on a digital platform. A design can be considered print design if its final form was created through an imprint made by the impact of a stamp, seal, or dye on the surface of the paper.
Purnell's History of the Second World War was a hugely successful weekly anthology or 'partwork' publication covering all aspects of the Second World War that was distributed throughout the English-speaking world. Produced shortly before the similarly accomplished 8-volume series on the First World War, it was first published in 1966, being reprinted several times during the 1970s. The magazine was notable for its use of many writers – often well-known military figures – of many nationalities to present a rounded view of the subject. This was combined with high-quality original artwork of the military hardware used, maps and numerous unseen photographs, some of them quite gruesome.
In printing, the doctor blade removes the excess ink from the smooth non-engraved portions of the anilox roll and the land areas of the cell walls. Doctor blades are also used in other printing and coating processes, such as flexo and pad printing for the same function. It is believed that the name derives from the blades used in flatbed letterpress equipment for blades used to wipe ductor rolls, and "ductor" became doctor.