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It was a shock to once hear a friend claim to be a genius. He is not an arrogant man. His assessment was based on reading A Book of Genius that embraced a review of intelligent quotients. He had a very high IQ. In mischief I enquired whether his genius emanated from not being a member of the printing industry and a stern rebuke rejected the notion. Our subsequent conversation covered the work of Alfred Binet (1857-1911), a French psychologist and founder of intelligence tests in the last century.

Genius is difficult to define, as our exchanges seemed to confirm. We must settle for a straightforward dictionary explanation: “a person who is exceptionally intelligent or able in some respect”.

Oscar Wilde had something to say on the subject: “The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives anything except genius.”

More prosaically, Dino Levi insisted that a genius was ‘a man who can rewrap a new shirt and not have any pins left over’.

Over the years, I have encountered many gifted people in the printing industry, as well as a few that suffered from self-delusion. In the 1960s and 1970s, I remember a number of computer consultants that flitted through the trade. They were abominably supercilious and treated most printers as dunderheads and beyond redemption. Most sunk without trace.

Among the most talented people that I have met in printing must rank John Crosfield, a man of immense vision who was instrumental in gaining acceptance for electronics in the industry. Another was Arthur Phillips, a research director at HMSO with a keen intellect. He was an early innovator in the application of computers to pre-press work.

Lawrence Wallis held international pre-press marketing positions and was a respected author and print historian.