Ulverscroft Large Print

About Ulverscroft Large Print

Ulverscroft Large Print Books Ltd is a British publisher of large print editions of popular books, founded in 1964 by Fred A. Thorpe and based in the village of Anstey, near Leicester.

Thorpe had run a mobile library around Leicestershire before the Second World War and, after RAF service, published British editions of American magazines from 1946. After a local health visitor told him that poor eyesight was keeping older people from reading, he set up Ulverscroft to reissue existing titles in larger type for libraries and readers with poor sight. In 1969 it moved to 16-point type in normal-sized bindings, which helped large print win acceptance in public libraries. The first books appeared in September 1964 and included Agatha Christie's A Pocket Full of Rye, Thomas Firbank's I Bought a Mountain, Edgar Wallace's The Avenger and Netta Muskett's The Fettered Past.

Early copies were colour coded by genre: green for non-fiction, black for mystery, red for general fiction and blue for romance. Pictorial covers replaced plain ones in 1981, though the colour code survives on spines. The firm added the Charnwood imprint for current bestsellers in 1981 and the Linford softcover series of westerns, mysteries and romances three years later. It began distributing audiobooks on cassette in 1985, and later bought Magna Large Print (1990), Isis Publishing of Oxford (2001 or 2002, as the firm's own history gives both) and Soundings (2002).

Ulverscroft remains active, publishing dozens of large print titles each month and distributing unabridged audiobooks to libraries in the UK, Australia and New Zealand.