I know, it’s a tenuous link, but I was immediately struck by the simplicity of the uppercase characters and the rhythmic linespacing and justification. In that post I mentioned that I was looking out for a John Bull printing kit but not having much luck. The manufacture of rubber stamping toys for children was carried on alongside these commercial activities. I did a little Googling to see if those three names meant anything and came up with Southwood farm in Cleobury Mortimer, Worcestershire. A 1916 sales receipt from a Wandsworth stationer also clearly refers to a John Bull Printing Set, eleven years before the trade mark was registered with the Department of Trade.

Wayne is a very talented typographer and is currently learning the art of lettercutting in stone and wood, so as you would imagine, there are lots of images of inscriptions an lettering. By the early 1930s a slab-serif typeface with upper and lower-case characters had been introduced, along with more expensive sets with illustration printing blocks showing clowns, a Native American Chief and farm or zoo animals.As a child I always dreamed of producing my own newspaper but didn’t follow it through, just printing odds and ends with that John Bull outfit.

It works in the same principle of every other home letterpress kit – lots of tiny rubber squares with reversed letters raised up on the top surface. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item.You can see Stephen Fry playing with one of these Outfits early on in his Gutenberg film, which you can see here. The top rated TV show was The Budget (All Channels) and the box office smash was Lawrence of Arabia.

My husband Roy Balcomb founded the Databac Group in Kingston upon Thames in 1970, producing Identity Cards. I like to think that all things are connected in some small way, and in this case the link may be only very vaguely typographic, but it is a link I made and I’ll stick with it. The reason John Bull made a printing set may puzzle some as they were more renowned for rubber tires and puncture outfits in the 1950s and 1960s.

Rubber illustration blocks would be introduced into the sets by the late 1920s, but had also been sold separately under the “Charter” name for three decades or more. Maybe that’s why a decade or so later I was pretty good as the “stone sub” on a real newspaper, being able to read what it said in the galleys upside-down and back-to-front. A number of late Victorian and Edwardian rubber stamping sets for children also carry the “Charter” trade mark. Younger readers, let me explain: the set consisted of little strips of rubber letters which you cut up, then placed back-to-front in a little ridges on a ‘stamp’.