Horace Hart (1840 - 1916)

RA Collection: People and Organisations

English printer and biographer. He was the author of Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers, first issued in 1893.

He was sent to the printers Woodfall & Kinder in London at the age of fourteen, and was apprenticed to the compositor’s trade two years later. By the age of twenty-six he had become manager of Woodfall & Kinder but left to take over management of the London branch of the Edinburgh-based Ballantyne Press. He left Ballantyne Press in 1880, when he was appointed manager of the head office and main works of William Clowes & Sons, which was then the biggest printing house in Britain. He left Clowes three years later to become Controller of the Oxford University Press. Hart served as Printer to the University of Oxford and Controller of the University Press from 1883 until 1915. During that time, he convinced the Press to begin using wood-pulp paper, and also introduced collotype and printing by lithography.

In 1896, he wrote a monograph on Charles, Earl Stanhope and the Oxford University Press. In 1900, he wrote Notes on a Century of Typography at the University Press Oxford 1693–1794.

Profile

Born: 1840 in Suffolk

Died: 1916

Gender: Male

Associated books

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