Production values
'The commendable physical properties of this set, including good paper, stitched (not glued) signatures, and durable covers, ensure the set's longevity, especially for library use. Sadly, such quality is no longer standard, even for expensive reference and scholarly books recently published by premier academic presses. Pickering and Chatto is consistently the exemplary exception.'
– Review of Eighteenth-Century Labouring-Class Poets, Eighteenth-Century Studies
Our books are produced to the most rigorous standards. Since a good critical edition will spend hundreds of years in a library, we back up our scholarship with the very highest production values.
All of our books are printed and bound in the United Kingdom at some of the most respected printing presses, such as Cambridge University Press. They are printed on acid-free paper that meets international standards for permanency, and all our editions use sewn bindings to ensure the highest standards of durability.
We use a balance between traditional litho-printing and cutting-edge digital technology, along with clear design and typography to ensure that our reset and facsimile texts are both readable and attractive. We do not, however, use print-on-demand (POD) technology, as this has so far failed to meet our scrupulous production standards.
When an original document arrives in our office it is often in poor condition. Many of the texts produced for our facsimile editions were originally printed poorly on low quality paper and the text has deteriorated significantly over the centuries. However, we now use professional digital cleanup software on all our facsimile reprints, which has proved to be a huge improvement upon old production techniques. Each page of text is scanned in, and the dust and noise on the image are automatically removed. More serious defects are then restored individually, resulting in a page which is clearer and more readable than the original.
In these pages reproduced from the edition Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, the original text comes from the Gray’s Inn Journal, 1753. The text itself has been suffers from show-through and paper damage. However, the results after cleaning show a dramatic improvement.