The Society of London Bookbinders Protests the Introduction of the Rolling Press

By December 1830 several of the larger bookbinderies in London had installed rolling presses, also known as rolling machines. This machine, which consisted of a heavy iron mangle designed to press flat sheets of printed matter before they were folded and sewn, threatened the livelihood of the Beaters, a semi-skilled class of bookbindery worker who used heavy beating hammers to flatten the surface of the paper. To discuss this problem the London Society of Bookbinders held a meeting on December 7, 1830, and on December 14 composed, printed, and circulated The memorial of the Journeymen Bookbinders of London and Westminster on the Effects of Machinery, respectfully addressed to their Employers. This was signed by 498 binders. 

In his anonymously published book, The Results of Machinery, Namely, Cheap Production and Increased Employment, Exhibited: Being an Address to the Working-Men of the United Kingdom published in 1831 soon after the bookbinders "Memorial", writer and publisher Charles Knight pointedly criticized the position of the bookbinders. He wrote on pp. 156-158:

"We have a remarkable example of the folly of a particular body of men upon this subject now lying before us. We have a paper, dated 16th of December, 1830, issued by nearly five hundred journeymen bookbinders of London and Westminster, calling upon their employers to give up the use of a machine for beating books. Books, before they are bound in leather, were beat with large hammers upon a stone, to make them solid. That work is now done in London by a machine. The workman is relieved from the only portion of his employ which was sheer drudgery—from the only portion of his employ which was so laborious, that it rendered him unfit for the more dlicate operations of bookbinding, which is altogether an art. The greatest blessing ever conferred upon bookbinders, as a body, was the invention of this machine. Why? It has set at liberty a quantity of mere labour without skill to furnish wages to labourers with skill. The master bookbinders of London and Westminster state that they cannot find good workmen in sufficient quantities to do the work which the consumer requires. The good workmen and the bad were each employed in the drudgery of beating, which called into action a certain muscular power of the arm and hand, which unfitted them for the delicacy and rapidity of other operations of bookbinding. The good workmen were therefore lessened by the drudgery of the beating hammer; but the bad workmen, the mere labourers, whose work a very simple machine can do better, feel that they cannot compete with this machine. Why? They were indolent and dissipated and the work which they neglected is now done without their aid. The real delay in bookbinding was always occasioned by the delay in beating. It was a mere drudgery which the better men paid others to perform; and these mere drudges, by the neglect of their work, kept the higher orders of bookbinders idle. And yet, in spite of their own experience, all the bookbinders try to put down the beating-machine, which, in truth, has a tendency, above all other things, to elevate their trade, and to make that an art which in one divison of it was a mere labour. If the painter were compelled to grind his own colours and make his own frames, he would no longer follow an art, but a trade; and he would receive the wages of a labourer instead of the wages of an artist, not only so far as related to the grinding and frame-making, but as affecting all his occupations, by the drudgery attending a portion of them."

In response to Knight's criticism the Journeymen Bookbinders issued a 40-page pamphlet:

The Reply of the Journeymen Bookbinders, to Remarks on a Memorial addressed to their Employers, on the Effects of a Machine Introduced to Supercede Manual Labour, as Appeared in a Work Published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowedge, with Observations on the Influence of Machinery on the Working Classes in General (London: Published for the Society by William Smith, 1831).

The complaints and arguments by the Society of London Bookbinders were ineffective in causing any of binderies to discard their rolling presses or beating machines.

Ellic Howe and John Child, The Society of London Bookbinders 1780-1951. London: Sylvan Press, 1952. Chapter 12 "Man versus Machines" pp. 105-109.