Printing in Calcutta to 1800 : a description and checklist of printing in late 18th-century Calcutta

The Bibliographical Society, Oxford University Press, London, 1981. Cloth, 8vo, 25 cm,. xi, 249 pp, ills. From the introduction: "Once..the first printing-shop had opened there in 1772, just twenty years after the battle of Plassey, Calcutta rapidly developed into the largest centre of printing in the subcontinent during the last two decades of the eighteenth century, appropriate to its paramount importance to the British as an administrative, commercial and social base. Furthermore, while the presses in Madras remained very much in the hands of government and missionaries, Calcutta saw a proliferation of commercial printing-shops and newspaper-offices.Previous studies of early printing in Calcutta and Bengal have largely concentrated upon the pioneering efforts of Charles Wilkins in casting the first Bengali types and in setting up the Honorable Company's Press, with the tendency then to pass directly on to the post-1800 period and to examine the undoubted achievements of the Serampore Press. Consequently, the full range of printing in late eighteenth-century Calcutta - commercial as well as government and missionary - with its attendant innovations has not been properly documented hitherto or its predominantly English-language output adequately recorded. The purpose of the present study, therefore, is to consider all the pre- 1800 presses, but particularly those with a commercial base, through a description of the general conditions obtaining in the printing trade during that period and through a reconstruction of the careers of the indiv idual printers involved. An attempt has also been made to assess the scale and scope of their combined output through the compilation of an annotated checklist of all works known to have been printed in Calcutta before 1800, with the weekly newspapers and monthly magazines treated as a separate category. Very Good.