September 02, 2020

How Milling was printed

by Mildred Cookson, The Mills Archive Trust, UK

Over the last few months of lockdown I have been increasingly impressed by how smoothly the publication of Milling and Grain proceeds. Working from home, digital communication supports us in many ways; thank goodness it also enables the production of high quality printed journals. This train of thought set me thinking about the early days of Milling, the ancestor of today's issue.

An interesting well-illustrated article in the August 15th, 1903 issue of Milling described how the journal was printed in the days when digital only meant "of the finger". The first issue of Milling appeared in 1891, published by The Northern Publishing Company Ltd. The magazine was the brainchild of George James Short Broomhall, described by John Maynard Keynes as the "greatest practical statistician of our age" when he died in 1933. His stable included the Liverpool Corn Trade News, which first appeared in December 1888, renamed The Corn Trade News in 1890 and Broomhall's Corn Trade News in 1895.
 


Based in Liverpool, the early editions strongly featured Lancastrian companies. Milling was quite unique as scarcely any trade papers were printed by the proprietors; most were sent out to printing works to be set up and printed. The offices and printing works were in the busiest part of the city, close to the port. Facing the River Mersey, the offices were situated midway between the newly erected White Star Line and St Nicholas Church. The building was part of a group of warehouses known as the Goree Piazza. Named after the former slave trading island off the coast of Senegal, West Africa, the warehouses were built 11 years after the courts ruled that every slave became free as soon as their feet touched English soil.

The warehouses were demolished following bomb damage during the Second World War. The buildings had been very firmly built, as evidenced by their housing the heavy printing machinery that was installed in No 17. The roofs were low and the floors very extensive; all the upright pillars which supported the beams were of expensive woods and as hard as iron. By 1903 two modern machines, the Linotype and the Monotype, had been introduced, driven electrically rather than relying on a gas engine.


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
This blog is maintained by The Global Miller staff and is supported by the magazine Milling and Grain
which is published by Perendale Publishers Limited.


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