NEW YORK, NY.- A new exhibition at The Grolier Club explores the evolution of technology and its impact on labor through a close look at the history of printing. The Second Printing Revolution: Invention of Mass Media, on view in the Club’s ground floor gallery from January 14 through April 11, 2026, examines the transition from handcrafted book production to mechanized papermaking, printing, illustration, typesetting, and bookbinding. Curated by Grolier Club member Jeremy Norman from his personal collection, the exhibition features 150 books, prints, and artifacts from 1800–1904, with many rarities from England, France, Germany, and the United States. An accompanying catalogue will be available in January 2026.
“At the beginning of the 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had been underway in England for nearly a century, yet book production had hardly changed since Gutenberg’s invention of printing by movable type in the mid-15th century,” said curator Jeremy Norman. “This exhibition tells the story of the second printing revolution that took place during the 19th century, as key inventions led to some of the first developments in mass production and the factory system, and ushered in a period of profound change in the socio-economic relationship between workers and employers.”
Exhibition Highlights
The exhibition is organized into four movements: Innovation, detailing steam-powered presses and papermaking; Distribution, exploring the spread of early magazines and the challenges of mechanizing typesetting; Design, highlighting bookbinding and color imagery; and Scale, focusing on mass printing in America. Interludes between the movements spotlight the railroad and mass market reading, women’s labor, and Charles Dickens.
The Innovation section shows how at the beginning of the 19th century, the daily London newspaper The Times, founded in 1785, could only publish 4,000 copies of a four-page edition on iron handpresses. On November 29, 1814, the first issue of The Times was printed on a double-cylinder steam-powered printing machine; the exhibition features a copy of that historic newspaper and a diagram of the machine. By 1895, the French daily newspaper Le Petit Journal reached a circulation of two million copies. On view is a 1901 illustration of inventor Hippolyte Marinoni demonstrating his high-speed press that printed Le Petit Journal’s color supplement, and a 1902 calendar depicting a crowd of people eagerly buying copies of the newspaper.
An interlude on railroads demonstrates how steam power impacted both transit and book making. As vast numbers of passengers came to expanding cities in Britain, newspapers could not print enough copies to satisfy public demand. Mechanization increased the size of sheets of paper and sped up printing, enabling more efficient distribution, and the rise of new rail reading guides and mass-produced “yellowback” novels stimulated the growth of literacy.
The Distribution section explores how mechanized printing sped the circulation of print media, as seen with the Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), an educational reform group founded in 1826. SDUK used new high-speed, steam-powered printing technologies to publish inexpensive, informative works for mass readership. On view is SDUK’s The Menageries (1829), the first extensively illustrated machine-printed book, featuring highly detailed woodcuts of animals. Also on view is Robert Seymour’s The March of Intellect (London, 1828), a satirical illustration about the social impact of groups like SDUK, featuring an automaton made of printing machine parts, with a head of books topped by a university, that is sweeping away quackery.
An interlude about women’s labor addresses gender inequities in the printing industry. Women worked as typesetters, earning a fraction of the wage of male workers, and were seen as competition when machines displaced workers. The exhibition features a 1794 French petition for a women’s typographic school, promoting an apprenticeship program so “the most worthy half of the human race” was not “reduced to dependence on the other half.”
The Distribution section explores how mechanized printing sped the circulation of print media, as seen with the Society of the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), an educational reform group founded in 1826. SDUK used new high-speed, steam-powered printing technologies to publish inexpensive, informative works for mass readership. On view is SDUK’s The Menageries (1829), the first extensively illustrated machine-printed book, featuring highly detailed woodcuts of animals. Also on view is Robert Seymour’s The March of Intellect (London, 1828), a satirical illustration about the social impact of groups like SDUK, featuring an automaton made of printing machine parts, with a head of books topped by a university, that is sweeping away quackery.
An interlude about women’s labor addresses gender inequities in the printing industry. Women worked as typesetters, earning a fraction of the wage of male workers, and were seen as competition when machines displaced workers. The exhibition features a 1794 French petition for a women’s typographic school, promoting an apprenticeship program so “the most worthy half of the human race” was not “reduced to dependence on the other half.”
The final section of the exhibition, Scale, focuses on printing in America. Highlights on view include an 1826 bible, printed in Boston, that was the first edition of the Old and New Testaments ever printed on a printing machine; and a rare mid-19th century stereo photograph of a large printing machine, with a woman sitting on it in a full skirt, who was likely employed to feed paper into the machine.
