Brooke Crutchley began his influential printing career at the age of twenty-three, when Cambridge University offered him a position as assistant university printer. He would remain at the printing house for forty-four years, the last twenty-eight as head printer. Cambridge University’s press was regarded as one of the best in the world, and so, when Crutchley shifted the press’s focus from hot-metal composition and letterpress printing to filmsetting and offset, the rest of the printing world soon followed suit.
In addition to leading the printing house and curating book-arts exhibitions, Crutchley wrote two memoirs of his life as a printer and commissioned Stanley Morison’s beautifully produced account of the Monotype program, A Tally of Types. These books, which Crutchley printed at Cambridge, are now considered classics on the subject of typography and art objects in themselves.