Strawberry Hill Press and its Printing House

Clarke Stephen

Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill Press, founded in 1757, is the most celebrated of the early English private presses, unique for the importance of the books, pamphlets and ephemera it produced. This illustrated study of the Press draws on a remarkable array of surviving images of the Printing House, many of them newly discovered and previously unstudied. But more than that, this book provides an original and sustained analysis of Walpole's extraordinary literary endeavour, and of the complex variety of purposes that the Press fulfilled. The volume not only assesses all known images to discover what they can tell us about Walpole's Press, but also reveals that, quite unexpectedly, a large part of Walpole's Printing House survives to this day.

About the Author

Stephen Clarke is head of commercial property at a London solicitors' firm and an amateur scholar in the best Walpole tradition. He is a trustee of a number of learned societies, a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and an expert on Samuel Johnson as well as Horace Walpole.

Reviews

"Stephen Clarke's great accomplishment in this superbly produced volume is to chart the development of the printing house, using more than eighty portraits, sketches, paintings, engravings, maps and title pages" – James Raven, Times Literary Supplement

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