Welcome to the Waddleton Chronology of colour printed illustrations




Norman Waddleton May 1916 - February 2008


Originally this database recorded Norman Waddleton's attempt to collect all books having colour-printed illustrations or decorations from 15th Century up to 1893, but as his collection grew he later decided to include books with craft colour-printing, especially auto-litho, woodblock and linocuts published into the 20th Century and early 21st Century. The first consolidated volume of the Chronology was published in 1993 and since then Supplements 1 to 6 have been published with the last, Supplement 7, published in 2003. These bibliographies have been written to assist research and are therefore not necessarily in the accepted formal format used by booksellers. There are many cross-references and also information from standard Reference Books in the description field to assist researchers. Individual books are referenced by the published date followed by the sequence number for that year, some years have more than 300 sequence numbers. The Waddleton Collection includes publications from all over the world including at least 20 languages from Catalonian to Welsh.

The published Chronology included all books collected to 2003, however this database contains all the books collected to 2007, including those in the Collection with no verifiable date and the "Not in Collection" books which have a 400 series sequence number, totaling 27,770 records in all. There is also a world index of colour printers with places and dates of publication.

The addition of a specimen image from each book continues, at the moment standing at 6,424 and we are continuing with The Book of the Month feature as this enables users to see more images from the Collection.