Rowe started work with the Pitman Press in Bath. In 1954 the firm bought Western Printing Services, which had provided typesetting for the trade, and Rowe became its manager. Western became famous, and Rowe may have risked prosecution under British obscenity law, when he printed for Penguin Books the first unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which other printers had avoided. In the event, with 200,000 copies in storage during October/November 1960, Penguin alone was prosecuted and acquitted. 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". His second encounter with censorship occurred when he inadvertently became subject of a Fatwa after printing 100 sample copies of ‘Satanic Verses’. One evening his dinner with Charlotte was disturbed by a dozen SAS officers crawling up his lawn late at night when the security alarm was set off in error. Antony Rowe Ltd has since become part of the CPI SAS printing group and is now a leading provider of print on demand services to both traditional publishers and new self-publishing services that act as an intermediary between the author and the printer, such as CompletelyNovel. 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 and Houseman, Lovelace and a curious friend, Torquatus, who a note by S. A. Gitta 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 in 1970. His third marriage was to Charlotte Savage in 1985. Antony Rowe had three brothers, Ronnie, Michael and David, and three sisters, Heather, Grace and Glory, who entertained each other as children playing music together. Antony was an accomplished pianist who was never short of female vocal accompanists. He appreciated beauty and was Chair of the Bath Arts Festival for several years. He has two children, by his first wife Jenny: Giles and Antonia. His family’s favourite dog was his German Short Haired Pointer, Apollo, who accompanied him to the Bath Press every day. Rowe never lived far from Bath. He died in Upper Swainswick, Somerset, at the age of 79.
