Clowes.English firm of printers. It was established in London in 1803 by William Clowes the elder(17791847) and achieved success by making accuracy, speed and quantity its chiefgoals; periodicals and official reports as well as books and catalogues (from 1820produced by steam machinery) were an important part of its output. By 1843 it operatedthe largest printing works in the world, with 24 presses, its own type and stereotypefoundries, and 2500 tonnes of stereo plates and 80,000 woodcuts in store. It executedmajor works for the Royal Academy of Arts, the Society for the Diffusion of UsefulKnowledge, the Great Exhibition and the British Museum (General Catalogue of PrintedBooks, 18811900).William Clowess achievement in music printing rests on his advocacy of musicaltypography at a time when engraved-plate methods predominated. Aiming specifically forthe increased efficiency and lower unit costs of type-printed music in large edition sizes,he effected real improvements in this method (better clarity, a more precise junction ofstaff lines), issuing as his pilot projects, for a variety of publishers, The Harmonicon(182333), the Musical Library (18347) and Sacred Minstrelsy (18345). These serialventures broke new ground in the marketing of serious music and musical literature inEngland. The firms most successful music publication has been Hymns Ancient andModern, first brought out by Novello in 1861; taken over by Clowes in 1868, it reached asale of more than 100 million copies by 1935. In 1999 they were contracted to typesetthe second edition of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.BIBLIOGRAPHYHumphries-SmithMP[W. Ayrton: ] On the Various Processes Applied to Printing Music, MonthlySupplement, Musical Library, i (1834), 14S. Smiles: Men of Invention and Industry (London, 1884), 20819W.B. Clowes: Family Business 18031953 (London, 1953)L. Langley: The Life and Death of The Harmonicon: an Analysis, RMARC, no.22(1989), 13763LEANNE LANGLEY