Jacqueline and Thomas Vautrollier arrived in London as Huguenot refugees from France. They set up as printers in London in the 1560s. Jacqueline played an active role in the Vautrollier printing business. When her husband Thomas was working in Edinburgh, she ran their printing house back in London. Despite the Vautrolliers not being free of the Stationers’ Company through special permissions and patents, even after Thomas’s death, they maintained a steady flow of publications. In 1588, the widowed Jacqueline is reported to have printed a Greek New Testament and Martin Luther’s Commentarie on Galatians. In 1589, Vautrollier married her husband’s former apprentice, Richard Field. She was therefore likely involved in the impressive line of works known to be produced by Field at this time, including the poems of William Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser.
One of three daughters of the printers Andrew Sowle and Jane Sowle who went into the book trade, Tace Sowle inherited the management of the family printing house and her father’s post as printer to the Society of Friends. She was freed of the Stationers’ Company by patrimony in 1695. Tace Sowle’s tenure as head of the Sowle press was the most active and prolific period of the Sowle press. John Dunton also noted her skill as a compositor. Tace eventually married in 1706 but took precautions to retain her independence and family’s control of the press. She adopted the compound surname Sowle Raylton and appointed her mother, Jane Sowle, as nominal head of the Sowle press. Tace outlived her husband by over twenty years. She died in 1749 and was buried at Bunhill Fields. For fifty-eight years she was the important Quaker printer in Britain.
After the death of her husband, printer David Mallet, in 1683, Elizabeth became the operator of their two printing presses in Black Horse Alley, near Fleet Bridge. She specialised in lurid and sensational tracts, registering a great number of such works with the Stationers’ Company. Mallet also produced serial publications, such as The New State of Europe, and, most famously, the first ten issues of the Daily Courant, the first daily newspaper in Britain.