Kuwait’s government press, 1956: two buildings on Dasman Street, then 170 machines
Its first printers trained in Cairo, London and Germany; by 1963 it turned out nearly 48 million items a year.
On 13 January 1954, Kuwait’s Supreme Executive Committee created a Department of Publications and Publishing to print the official gazette and everything else the government issued, and to equip it with a modern press bought by tender. Two years later, on 13 October 1956, the department opened its press and named it the Kuwait Government Press.
From Dasman Street to the Ministry of Guidance
It began in two facing buildings on Dasman Street, and later moved into the new building of the Ministry of Guidance and Information, which took over from the publications department.
School students sent abroad to learn the trade
The first recruits were secondary-school students who applied to train as printers. Mohammed Al-Omar, later head of the Monotype section, spent seventeen months at the Amiri Press in Cairo before coming home with his colleagues. Further groups followed to London and Germany on courses of about six months, learning machine typesetting and press operation.
A new Kuwaiti recruit joined as a trainee on a monthly allowance of 26.250 dinars for eighteen months, moving to a different section every four months as an assistant in printing, typesetting or zincography, and was promoted if he passed.
The press in 1963
- About 619 people, from clerks and technicians to labourers and trainees, with Kuwaitis making up 80% of the workforce.
- More than 170 machines, according to its director, Fahad Hamoud Al-Jarrah.
- Every job carried a work order on which each section head logged his stage, and daily output sheets went up to the director.
- Output for May 1963 alone: 6,325,751 printed items. For the year 1962–1963: 47,697,769.
Those figures come from a four-page report in the magazine Dunya Al-Uruba, issue 34, published on 12 October 1963, a day before the press turned seven.
Photo: An old cylinder press in a museum, illustrative and not from the Kuwait Government Press. inkknife_2000, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr and Wikimedia Commons.
Source: “The story of the Government Press from Dasman Street to the Ministry of Guidance”, Al-Qabas, drawing on Dunya Al-Uruba issue 34 (12 October 1963), as republished on the Kuwait History forum; and Hamza Alayan’s book Kuwait in the Fifties (Dhat Al-Salasil), as reviewed by Asharq Al-Awsat on 29 October 2020. Both read on 3 November 2026.
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