A Pioneering Printer

Lund Humphries, today, is known for publishing books on contemporary art and artists; few know that its roots are in a jobbing printers in Bradford. But Bradford, at the turn of the century, was no provincial backwater, but a city at the centre of the world's wool industry and Percy Lund Humphries was not merely a jobbing printer serving the local industry, but a progressive firm with ambitions well beyond the boundaries of Yorkshire. In its time it was to publish The Penrose Annual, an essential read for those interested in printing and the graphic arts and Typographica, the most avant garde journal on typography; it mounted extraordinary exhibitions in its grand London office in Bedford Square it carried type for languages across the world, crucial for the governments need for language textbooks for those serving overseas in WWII; and much more.