author

William Skeen

d. 1872

A nineteenth-century printer, writer, and lecturer in Ceylon, he wrote with unusual range—moving from the history of typography to poetry shaped by mountain life and coffee cultivation. His work offers a vivid glimpse of colonial Sri Lanka through the eyes of someone deeply involved in its print culture.

1 Audiobook

Early Typography

Early Typography

by William Skeen

About the author

Active in Ceylon in the mid-1800s, William Skeen is best remembered as a government printer and author. Library records for Early Typography identify him as born around 1822 and dying in 1872, and describe the book as an expanded version of a lecture he delivered before the Colombo Athenaeum in 1853.

His writing was not limited to printing history. Surviving book records also show him publishing Mountain Life and Coffee Cultivation in Ceylon: A Poem on the Knuckles Range, with Other Poems in 1870, suggesting a writer equally interested in the island’s landscape and plantation world.

Skeen also appears in historical records connected with early photography in Ceylon: a Smithsonian finding aid notes that he was the official Government Printer and that he purchased a Colombo photography studio for his son, William Louis Henry Skeen, who later became well known for photographic work there. Together, these traces point to a figure closely tied to the literary, printing, and visual culture of nineteenth-century Ceylon.