The Printworkers’ Collection is a huge documentary archive of labour history. Mark Crail visited the Marx Memorial Library to ask director Meirian Jump about a project to conserve and open it up to researchers and the public.

Since 2009, the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School has been home to a unique collection of material on the history of those who worked in the print, paper and publishing industry and their struggles for a better life.

Donated by the then Graphical, Paper and Media Union (GPMU), the collection includes printed journals, hand-written minute books, photographs of disputes and print union life, and more than thirty trade union banners, along with rule books, handbooks, trade union agreements and much more besides.

And over the past fifteen years, the Printworkers’ Collection has grown as organisations and individuals have donated records of industrial disputes, personal papers, badges and other material.

Three years ago, the Library’s team of volunteers began to create a basic inventory and shelf list of the collection; they documented all the printed materials on the Library’s online catalogue, and sorted and digitised more than 800 photos in the collection.

Despite their efforts, however, the collection is not yet fully sorted and catalogued, and there are fears that labour historians and other researchers are not making full use of an invaluable resource.

Now work is under way to rehouse and store the contents of the collection to archival standards, so that it is preserved and can be made available for generations to come.  Journals, print and handwritten material needs to be moved to archive-standard folders and boxes. And the Library hopes to get professional textile conservation advice on the preservation of its banner collection.

There are also plans to make the entire collection searchable in the Library’s online catalogue so that it can be opened up to new audiences, both directly and through a network of print archive and libraries locally and nationally. Ideally, the Library needs to employ a project archivist to make this happen.

The Library also has ambitious to step up its public engagement initiatives, as part of which it would like to hold a launch event once the current project is complete.

But none of this is cheap. The Society for the Study of Labour History has agreed a grant to support this work, as have others, but further funding is still needed.

Based in Marx House at 37a Clerkenwell Green, the Marx Memorial Library is ideally situated to house a history of workers’ struggles in the print and publishing industry.

Clerkenwell has a radical tradition that stretches back centuries, and it was at the heart of the capital’s print industry for generations – just a short walk from Shoe Lane, where Chartist publishers flourished in the 1840s, and Fleet Street where the newspaper industry, and its trade unions, were once ubiquitous. In the surrounding streets around Clerkenwell, meanwhile, numerous smaller printers and ancillary industries clustered close by.

Marx House itself has a long radical publishing history of its own. In the 1890s, the SDF founded the Twentieth Century Press to print its journal Justice. For many years, the paper’s editorial staff worked upstairs in what is now the Library’s reading room, while on the ground floor, in what has become the main meeting room, the presses thundered away printing the party’s paper and other materials.

From April 1902 to May 1903, Lenin worked in a shared upstairs office editing Iskra (Spark), which was printed in the building and smuggled into Russia.

Today, Fleet Street is no longer home to the national press. Much of the print industry itself has gone as more and more publications have moved online. And the print unions, their history stretching back to the early nineteenth century or before, have long since merged, first into a single print union before becoming part of the manufacturing union Amicus, and now as part of Unite the Union.

In 2022, Tony Burke and Ann Field, both retired senior officials at Unite and the GPMU, co-authored A Glorious History: Print and Papermaking Trade Unions in the UK and Ireland. Published by Unite, the book drew extensively on the Marx Memorial Library Printworkers’ Collection.

Illustrated with full-colour images of dozens of items from the Printworkers’ Collection, the contents page alone suggests the scale and scope of the material to be found in the archive: wages, working hours and holidays, cheap labour; the various aspects of the work, from composing and originating to the press and machine rooms and warehouses; women workers; union recognition, the wider trade union and labour movement, international solidarity…

The confident view of all those associated with the Library, however, is that there is still a wealth of material waiting for researchers to discover.

Further information

The Marx Memorial Library and Workers School has an extensive website, which includes further information about its own history and its current work. Find out more.

A Glorious History has been digitised and is available in PDF format. Find out more.

The Marx Memorial Library online catalogue includes a special section on the Printworkers’ Collection. Search the catalogue.

You can contribute to the Printers Collection Project. Find out more.