Conference date and venue: 20-21 July July 2021 | The Hub, Appleby-in-Westmorland

CumbriAlfred Wainwright (1907-91) is best known for his seven Pictorial Guides to the Lakeland Fells. Published between 1955-66 these handwritten, hand-drawn works of art have become the definitive guides to walking in the English Lake District.

The 2021 CPHC/Print Networks Conference will take place in Appleby-in-Westmoreland, on the edge of Wainwright’s Lakeland Fells. It is fitting, therefore, that the event should take as its theme ‘printing for tourists.’ The history of travel, transport and tourism is often graphically captured in the transient paper oddments which it has generated. This conference will look at the tickets, notices, leaflets, labels, folders, billheads and other throwaways, alongside books both physical and virtual, that have come to represent tourists and tourism across the ages.

The theme is interpreted widely and includes such things as:

• Guide books and travel guides;

• The publicity of visitor attractions;

• Prints and postcards;

• Labels, suitcase tags and bumper stickers;

• Travel information: maps, timetables, and tickets for trains and bus or voyages by sea;

• The printed ephemera of travelling by car: highway codes, tax disks, AA/RAC documentation;

• Hotel literature: menu cards, laundry labels, door hangers

• Souvenirs printed on ceramics, enamels, plastic, tin, confectionary or any other substrate.

Papers will emphasis the design, production, distribution and consumption of ‘printing for travel’ in relation to the British Isles across all periods of print from early modern to the present. Papers may include the technology, typography and design; the people, printers, publishers and distribution networks involved; pricing and sales; and the buyers and readers..

The venue: Appleby-in-Westmoreland is an attractive market town and ancient royal borough situated in the Eden Valley, midway between the North Pennines and English Lake District and offering access to the Yorkshire Dales. A town perhaps more generally famed for its annual Gypsy Horse Fair. It was the home of Lady Anne Clifford, Jack (‘before I could say…’) Robinson and birthplace of Richard More the seventeenth-century London Bookseller. William Camden spoke well of its main street and it boasts one of England’s 1,000 best churches complete with the Clifford memorial and a chained 1632 ‘Book of Martyrs.’ A short break in this lovely area could well be combined with the conference.

Print Networks committee: Caroline Archer-Parré; Catherine Armstrong; Maureen Bell; Giles Bergel; Ruth Connolly; Julia Cunningham; John Hinks; Elaine Jackson; Barry McKay; David Osbaldestin; Lisa Peters