WE are a nation governed by time and technology. Eight minutes since the best friend read that Whatsapp message, one hour to go until that Skype call with the parents and 10 seconds until “download complete”.

But standing under the stopped clock in the cold reel room of the warehouse that in its heyday famously printed a million books in 24 hours, it would appear time and technology have forgotten about Cox & Wyman’s workers.

The final countdown has begun at one of the oldest businesses to grace the streets of Reading as its 41 remaining employees prepare to sign on the dotted line of their redundancy agreements following the loss of a major contract with their main client, publishing giant Penguin Random House. The company was pipped to the post by competitor St Ives Clays, which has announced plans to double its digital book production.

But among the ink-stained coffee mugs, the piles of sawdust swept into corners and thundering output machinery, last week the air was filled with a dense nostalgia.

“We have been living with the threat of being shut down for years now but I suppose we just never really thought it would ever happen,” said printer Phil Winchcombe, of Pangbourne, as he showed me clippings of Cox &Wyman’s rich history from the towering scrapbooks in the tea room.

The 63-year-old, who began as an apprentice and has worked for the company for 43 years, added: “We’ve still got a job to do at the end of the day and we’re still getting paid to get things done, so the news hasn’t really kicked in just yet, but I think when the redundancy negotiations are all over it will sink in a little more.”

Fellow printer Dave Goss, of Prospect Park, said the trade is dying a quick death as technology continues to develop. The 62-year-old, who began with the printers in 1981, said: “It’s just the way of the world at the moment really. Technology will only ever get better and I suppose it was just a matter of time. People these days live faster, busier lives with everything on their phones and iPads.

“For me, I’m in my 60s and can live off my redundancy pay for a while but I’ll still take up part time work because work is my livelihood.

“I started at Cox & Wyman as a 16-year-old apprentice, and to go from working for so many years to nothing can feel unnatural to some people.”

The old letter presses which used to populate the composing room at Cardiff Road — as depicted in the black and white picture taken in 1903 — has been replaced with gigantic, whirring, all-singing-and-dancing computerised machines.

The production line is controlled by a Stachan and Hernshaw printing machine (pictured below) but when asked how much training is needed to operate it, Mr Winchcombe’s reply is brief: “It’s all automatic, there’s nothing manually operated about it.”

Cox & Wyman, owned by publisher CPI Books, has been operating in Reading since 1777 after being founded by Edward Cox.

In the past, one of its big contracts was to print national railway timetables at a small Reading train station shop.

In more recent days the workers were proud to admit that they have published every single copy of EL James’ erotic bestseller, Fifty Shades of Grey, which has now been made into a feature film. But the company’s flirtations with erotica is not new. Back in 1960 the printworks were sitting on the sidelines of a literary scandal which shocked the country when DH Lawrence’s explicit novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was banned.

The author, and publisher Penguin Books, were summoned to the Old Bailey and subjected to a series of gruelling cross-examinations under the Obscene Publications Act.

But after the six-day trial, when a unanimous “not guilty” verdict was returned, Cox & Wyman swung immediately into action, and produced an extra 300,000 copies.

In its time the firm has also printed James Bond novels and in June last year delivered a 25,000-copy reprint of Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, just 48 hours after the title was announced the winner of the prestigious Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

As the end of my tour of the historical Cardiff Road building drew to a close, Mr Winchcombe produced some recent photographs he had developed of the loyal team taking part in charity and community events. As workers clocked themselves in for the next shift, on a machine probably older than I, he asked if I read books.

Tip-toeing around his question and deciding how best to deliver the blow, I was honest and told him I prefer to read books on my Kindle.

Laughing he turned to me and whispered: “Don’t worry, I got my wife one of those for Christmas.”

 Workers are holding a Cox & Wyman reunion at Rivers Health Club, Scours Lane on March 7 at 7pm.