Michael Twyman (1934-2025): a personal tribute

With the passing of Professor Emeritus Michael Twyman, the printing and ephemera worlds have lost a giant. It is not just that Michael’s knowledge dies with him, although he had so much still to tell us. But beyond the multitude of meticulously researched books, articles and lectures was a brilliant teacher, a man fully engaged in helping others to learn and understand, well beyond his retirement from full-time teaching at the University of Reading in 1998.

Michael was the Ephemera Society’s third President (from 2016 until earlier this year, when ill health obliged him to retire and he briefly became President Emeritus). He was a proactive President, attending Council meetings both in person and (post-Pandemic) online. He was an enthusiastic member of the Society for many years and contributed several fascinating articles to The Ephemerist. Even when he was very ill, Michael was always avid for news of the progress of the Society when I visited. Touchingly and typically, one of the last things he did before he died was to read and comment on my forthcoming article on the history of the Society.

I will leave others with far more knowledge than mine to write of Michael’s prowess as a world expert on printing, lithography and especially chromolithography. Through his writings, Michael repeatedly showed that the development of printing processes (especially at their most innovative) is inextricably linked to ephemera, notably in his seminal work of 1970, Printing 1770-1970, his groundbreaking exhibition at the Musée de l’Imprimerie in Lyon: ‘Images en Couleur. Les prouesses de la chromolithographie’ (2007-2008) and the accompanying book, and in his magnum opus: A history of chromolithography: printed colour for all (2013).

A later, more personal, example is my exhibition ‘The Art of Advertising’ (2020-2021). Michael not only curated a case devoted to printing processes and wrote the first chapter (‘Advertising takes shape: changing methods of production 1800 to 1939’) in the accompanying book, but also identified the printing processes of each and every item, including the number of colours in the case of chromolithographed ephemera. He did it, I think, because he saw a need, and a way to help me (possibly his worst student in the identification of printing processes beyond the basics) to show not just aspects of social history, not just the evolution of art and design in ephemera, but the crucial underlying development of the printing processes that enabled their creation. It was an example of Michael’s unstinting generosity of spirit. I will never forget it.

Michael’s own formation in ephemera was in the Constance Meade Memorial Collection of Ephemeral Printing (now the John Johnson Collection at the Bodleian Library), then housed at the Oxford University Press. Under the guidance of the late John Johnson’s former assistant, Lilian Thrussell, Michael went through nearly every box and folder. He went on to form his own collection, mainly, but not exclusively, of French ephemera. Spending his summers in France, Michael derived great pleasure from finding choice items in brocantes and car boot sales. Before his death, his collection (which he spent his last years cataloguing, documenting and photographing) was transferred to the Lettering, Printing and Graphic Design Collections at the University of Reading for teaching and research.

Michael formally founded the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading in 1974 and, with Maurice Rickards, formed the Centre for Ephemera Studies within it in 1993. He taught at the University from 1959 until 1998, becoming Professor in 1976. After his retirement, he continued to do some teaching and remained as Director of the Centre for Ephemera Studies. Students at Reading were encouraged to handle and examine (through loupes) Michael’s personal collection as well as items located in the Centre for Ephemera Studies. And there were courses and symposia for curators, members of the Ephemera Society and others, run by Michael and his colleagues, including Martin Andrews and Alan May. It was a great privilege to attend these and to benefit from the huge amount of work that went into them and the accompanying displays. There were also international courses, notably at the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, and at the Institut d’Histoire du Livre in Lyon. Through attending these I saw the hours of work that went into the preparation of slides and items of ephemera for each day. The same was true of Michael’s classes at Reading: a day was set aside to select the ephemera for Michael’s amazingly rich displays.

Michael’s Panizzi lectures in 2000: ‘Breaking the mould: the first 100 years of lithography’ were unforgettable, not least for his masterful management of two carousels of slides, showing simultaneously (for example) whole items and details of the printing process. Michael always went the extra mile. This was also true of his last frenetic year of work when, in celebration of Michael’s 90th birthday, the 2024 Journal of the Printing Historical Society presented the culmination of years of research on subjects that hadn’t yet been formalised into articles, including French song-sheets and British printers’ invoices. This was accompanied by a separate monograph: Reproducing the Bayeux Tapestry over three centuries, a subject dear to Michael’s heart. Just before his death, Michael was very excited by the prospect of the display of the tapestry at the British Museum in 2026.

Michael received many accolades and prizes, but these were not his raison d’être. He spent innumerable hours building grass-roots tools for the study and cataloging of ephemera. When Maurice Rickards died in 1998, before finishing The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, Michael somehow found the time in his own busy career to complete it, with a team of volunteers at the Centre (mostly experts from the Ephemera Society). It was published in 2000, just two years later. A Register of Ephemera Collections in the United Kingdom followed in 2003 then, in 2013, the Thesaurus of Ephemera Terms, authored by Barbara Morris and the fruit of hundreds of hours of, sometimes heated, debate on ‘ephemera Wednesdays’ at the Centre. When a French initiative, PatrimEph (La patrimonalisation des éphémères) began, in 2014, to examine the heritage of French ephemera, Michael (then 80), brought to it his characteristic enthusiasm, dedication and expertise. His long-held dream of creating a French version of the Reading ephemera thesaurus crystallised into a project that would expand to the rest of Michael’s life. The initial intensive and thoroughly enjoyable meetings of our small thesaurus working group were mostly in Paris, linked to PatrimEph study days on a variety of subjects (at which Michael often gave presentations). They subsequently became weekly online meetings. Michael saw the publication of the thesaurus online (albeit still far from complete) in 2023 (http://thesaureph.univ-rouen.fr/opentheso/index.xhtml) and was recently enthused by the addition of images, some of which he supplied. There is now an unfillable gap at our Friday meetings, keenly felt by all three of us.

At one point, Michael spoke of retiring (properly), but he never did. It wasn’t in his nature. I will miss Michael enormously as my mentor, but also as a friend. Rest, finally, in peace, Michael, and thank you.