Five Hundred Years of Printing is essential reading for the book collector, the cultural historian, the professional publisher and book designer, and teachers and students of typography, graphic design and communications studies. It immediately became established as a standard work on its publication as a Pelican in 1955 and saw two new editions within twenty years.

Five Hundred Years of Printing is now for the first time fully revised and republished in a larger format. With over a hundred superb illustrations chosen afresh from the incomparably rich collections of the British Library, it will interest anyone concerned with the history of the book in the West and the role of the printer as possibly the oldest agent of cultural change.

Five Hundred Years of Printing covers the history of printing from its invention by Gutenberg in about 1440; the design of books; changing styles and fashions in typeface design; the postwar changeover from metal type and letterpress printing to computers, phototypesetting and offset litho; writers, readers, publishers and printers; and the private presses, from William Morris and his predecessors to today.