A Letterpress Fixture Bill

Saturday, set in wood type: the kick-off hour, the admission price, the exclamation points earned.

Work: letterpress fixture bill
Maker: jobbing printers
Date: c. 1910
Era: The Edwardian game · 1901–1918
Source: The Football Association, 1914 · Wikimedia Commons

Kick-off is the oldest deadline that makes people happy.

This form has a living descendant: set your own date as a fixture bill →

Format

The full-resolution scan, colour-managed to the source — yours to print, study, and explore.

Size

$29.00

The story

Saturday, set in wood type. Before the game had broadcasters it had jobbing printers — the men who set the kick-off hour, the admission price, and the visiting eleven in whatever sizes the case could spare, hierarchy doing the shouting. The match bill is the game’s letterpress voice: pasted to walls on Thursday, soaked off by Sunday, almost none surviving — which is why the survivors read like telegrams from a lost Saturday. It is also the ancestor of this house’s Fixture Bill commission, which turns your own date into one. Kick-off is the oldest deadline that makes people happy.

See it on your wall

The piece, in the room it was made for

A Letterpress Fixture Bill, printed large and framed — in the den, the club bar, the supporters’ bar. Every edition ships ready to become the piece the room is built around.

A Letterpress Fixture Bill framed on the wall

About this reproduction

A reproduction of letterpress fixture bill — jobbing printers, c. 1910 — from the copy held by The Football Association, 1914 · Wikimedia Commons. The source. The work was published before 1931 and is public-domain verified.
Printed faithful to that source scan — restore honestly, disclose always. We do not re-colour it, complete it, or interpret it; the piece you receive is the image as it survives, halftone grain honored as history, not damage.
Printed to order on museum-grade cotton-rag stock with pigment inks — the pairing is rated 100+ years.
Colour-managed to the source; the tone of the paper and the ink is the period’s, not ours.
Ships in 5–10 business days, rolled in a heavy-wall tube (framed editions ship flat-packed).
If it arrives less than perfect, we reprint or refund — your choice.

Why our pieces cost more than a poster: a poster is a mass run on wood-pulp stock, colour-corrected to whatever flattered the press that day. This is one sheet, pulled for you, at a size where the maker’s hand is visible — the linework, the halftone grain, the lettering — on materials made to outlast their owner.

From the same collection

programme printers for the Empire Stadium · 1923

The First Wembley Programme, 1923

The programme of the White Horse Final — sold to a crowd that could not open its arms to read it.

The ephemera outlived the emergency.

Jobbing printer, Sarreguemines · 1921

Grand Match de Football, 21 November 1921

A jobbing-printer match bill from the Moselle, at nearly thirteen thousand pixels.

A poster is a hierarchy of shouts, well arranged.