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The
Drummond Press is a handprinting Press used
for undergraduate and postgraduate
courses at the University, and also quite regularly
used as the site of small informal exhibitions, offering
opportunity for hands on experience for visitors.
The Press was founded early in the 1970s by Vice-principal Denys Hay of the History Department and Dr Jonquil Bevan of the Department of English Literature.
From the outset there was a dual aim. Professor Hay wanted the Press to be a living museum, recording as much as was possible of the Old Technology, and commemorating what was clearly the rapidly dying pre-eminence of Edinburgh as a centre for printing excellence. Dr Bevan needed a bibliographical teaching press for her students.
A basic shopping-list was most generously provided by Michael Turner Esq., drawing on his experience of running the bibiographic teaching press at Oxford.
The Press itself, a Washington flat-bed press of early nineteenth-century design, is on loan from The Royal Scottish Museum (Chambers Street). Almost at once, local and national publicity brought in donations, and The Drummond Press is fortunate in now possessing a small but steadily growing collection of historical objects, many of which are in regular use.
The Press is housed in Edinburgh University
Library, for whose hospitality it is most grateful.
It was named The Drummond Press in tribute to William
Drummond of Hawthornden, an imortant benefactor to the
University Library in the seventeenth-century.
Jonquil
Bevan
Browse the
Drummond Press picture gallery
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