Cuala Industries was established in 1908 by sisters Elizabeth Corbet Yeats and Lily Yeats, after they left the Dun Emer Guild, which they had founded six years before with Evelyn Gleeson. Cuala Industries included an embroidery, weaving, and tapestry studio; a printing press; and a bindery. Cuala, like Dun Emer before it, was meant to promote Irish crafts made from Irish materials, and to employ Irish women. The majority of its employees were young local girls. Lily ran the embroidery studio; Elizabeth was the director of the printing and bindery portion of the business; and their brother W. B. was the literary editor. Cuala Press printed 66 titles before it ceased publishing books in 1946, including works by W. B. Yeats, George Russell, and Lady Gregory. The Press also printed cards, calendars, and other artwork. Jack Yeats designed some of the prints published by the Press. Cuala Press had difficulty competing with more modern and industrialized publishers and had frequent financial difficulties. After Elizabeth’s death in 1940, W. B.’s wife, Georgie, took over as director of the Press until her death in 1968.

Sources

Baskin, Lisa Unger. "A Gathering from the Dun Emer Press & the Cuala Press." The Massachusetts Review 28, no. 3 (1987). http://www.jstor.org/stable/25089906.

Murray, Simone. “The Cuala Press: Women, publishing, and the conflicted genealogies of ‘feminist publishing’,” Women's Studies International Forum, vol. 27, iss. 5-6 (2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2004.09.005.