Ulverscroft

About Ulverscroft

Ulverscroft is a Leicestershire publisher of large-print books and audiobooks, founded in 1964 by Frederick A. Thorpe, which says it produced the first large-print book that year.

Before the Second World War Thorpe ran a mobile library around Leicestershire, and he later produced British editions of American magazines. Planning to retire, he heard from a local health visitor that failing eyesight was stopping many older people from reading, and in 1964 he formed Ulverscroft Large Print Books Limited. Its first four titles came out in September 1964, among them Agatha Christie's A Pocket Full of Rye, and Christie asked for her whole catalogue to be issued in large print.

The first editions used type about twice the normal size and were awkward to hold. From 1969 the firm switched to 16-point type in standard-sized bindings, which it credits with winning over public libraries. It launched the Charnwood imprint for current bestsellers in 1981 and the Linford series in 1984, bought Magna Large Print of Yorkshire in 1990, and moved into audiobooks by acquiring Isis and Soundings of Whitley Bay in the early 2000s. Aurora, for Australasian titles, followed in 2019.

The Ulverscroft Foundation, a charity (number 264873) set up by trust deed in 1972, supports visually impaired people worldwide, and the company describes its work as carried out under the Foundation. It is based at Anstey, near Leicester.

How to spot a Ulverscroft first edition

Ulverscroft books are large-print editions of titles first issued in standard print by other publishers, so they are not first editions; its first 1964 list, for example, reprinted Agatha Christie's A Pocket Full of Rye.