The text of The English Newspaper is substantially that given as a series of six lectures in the Sandars Readership in Bibliography in February 1932, a post that Stanley Morison held at Cambridge University from 1931–2. He based most of his research on original sources from, among others, the British Museum, the Bodleian and University Libraries. His aim was to stimulate interest in the bibliographical history of newspaper development, despite this form being 'essentially ephemeral', which 'yet has a place, though humble, beside the cocdex and the printed book - the most permanent of records of human thought and experience'.