Antony Rowe

Antony Duncan Rowe (4 August 1924 – 5 December 2003), or Tony Rowe, He left Eton during the Second World War and joined the Royal Navy Submarine Service straight from school. In 1944 he was posted to the Far East, where he took part in the Japanese surrender of Hong Kong In 1949 Rowe was president of the Oxford club and a member of its Boat Race crew that was narrowly beaten by Cambridge. Rowe designed and printed The Western Type Book, with specimen pages of all the many different types held by Western in different sizes which became a bible for publishers' production managers. Rowe returned to the Pitman Press in 1972. He had identified a market for short-run printing and set out to make profitable runs of 100 or fewer when the threshold was generally considered to be 1,000 copies. After his retirement from Pitman Press in 1983, he established Antony Rowe Ltd in Chippenham, Wiltshire, using new techniques and equipment to cut costs; it became a successful business thanks to his ability to "think small".

He also published books of his own: 'For Lucasta with Rue', 'Poems by Torquatus' and 'Torquatus – A Half Life'. These were collections of poems, mainly by Horace (in the original Latin) and Houseman, Lovelace and a curious friend, Torquatus, who a note by S. A. Gitta (a pun on the Latin for Arrow) said died in 1969, the year of his divorce from Jenny. In 1986 he published Neurosis Induced Cannibalism in Antarctic Pigs, illustrated by his son Giles, under the pseudonym of P. Trotter.

Personal life In 1954, Rowe married Jennifer Renwick, the daughter of the first Independent TV magnate Sir Robert Renwick. In 1964 Sir Robert was awarded the last hereditary peerage. The marriage was dissolved in 1969, and Antony married Miranda Noel-Buxton (née Chisenhale-Marsh) in 1970. His third marriage was to Charlotte Savage in 1985.