English wallpaper manufacturing company founded c. 1880 by John Line. He was originally a cabinetmaker in Bath and in 1874 acquired a furniture business in Reading that was then run by Line’s three sons. The company had a London agent by 1880, when it began trading from Reading as a wallpaper wholesaler. Later it branched out into private design production, then block-printing and stencilling. The firm’s first pattern book (London, V&A, see Oman and Hamilton, no. 701) offered cheap machine prints, whose patterns showed the influence of design reformers, together with a few original blocked and stencilled patterns, many of which were designed for the firm by F. G. Froggatt. In 1892 the company moved to London and in 1905 issued a small collection, the success of which led to the building of a block-printing factory at Southall in 1906. By the same year complete decorative schemes could be printed to customers’ specifications. Designers who worked for Line included ...