Bisset's Magnificent Directory: Jones, Smart & Co., Glass Manufacturers (Plate W)

Plate W in James Bisset's Magnificent Directory (1800).

A page from Bisset's Magnificent Directory printed in 1800 depicting glass blowing at Jones, Smart and Co. who were glassmakers at Aston Hill in Birmingham.

Birmingham Printers: Thomas Aris & the Gazette Offices

Plate D from Bisset's Directory,
showing High Street, including the
Aris's Birmingham Gazette offices.

Thomas Aris was a London stationer and printer who came to Birmingham in about 1740 in order to set up a printing business, including publishing a newspaper in the town. It was not the town's first newspaper. Thomas Warren had printed The Birmingham Journal from 1732 which continued till 1743, but the paper that Aris set up, The Gazette, or Aris's Birmingham Gazette, was the dominant paper of Birmingham over the eighteenth-century. Also, Aris's Gazette survives, whereas there is only one known surviving copy of Warren's Journal.