Horace Hart (1840–1916) was an English printer and biographer, best known as the author of Hart's Rules for Compositors and Readers, first published in 1893.

Hart was born in Suffolk in 1840; his father was a shoemaker. He was sent to the printers Woodfall & Kinder in London at the age of fourteen, and was apprenticed to the compositor’s trade two years later. He became the manager of Woodfall & Kinder by the age of twenty-six, but left to take over management of the London branch of the Edinburgh-based Ballantyne Press. He left Ballantyne Press in 1880, when he was appointed manager of the head office and main works of William Clowes & Sons, which was then the biggest printing house in Britain. He left, however, after only three years at Clowes, when vacancy for Controller of the Oxford University Press was advertised.

Hart remained at Oxford University until a year before his death. He convinced the Press to begin using wood-pulp paper, and also introduced collotype and printing by lithography. In 1896, he wrote a monograph on 'Charles, Earl Stanhope and the Oxford University Press'. In 1900, he wrote Notes on a Century of Typography at the University Press Oxford 1693–1794. However, it is for his Rules for Compositors and Readers that he is best remembered. Although first published by Oxford University Press in 1893, this work had its origins in 1864, when Hart was a member of the London Association of Correctors of the Press, working for Woodfall & Kinder. With a small group of fellow members from the same printing house, he drew up a list of "rules", which was constantly updated and revised during his career at three other printing houses, and was finally published by Oxford in 1893.

The last twenty years of Hart's life were plagued by bouts of depression and insomnia. He suffered his first nervous breakdown in 1887, followed by another in 1888. A final, severe breakdown led to his retirement in 1915 at the age of seventy-five. The following year, he drowned himself in a secluded lake in the grounds of a neighbour’s garden.

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External links

• Biography of Horace Hart

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