The first mention of effort related to this project was in the very first Cog Counters Journal of February 1974:

"Label printers--What an assistance to dating and establishing lines of development if more accurate information on printers' periods of business was available. Chris Bailey, AC&WM, Bristol, is logging labels & printers--most complete file known of. When you run across one that's new, send it in." -- Ward Francillon

The project was initiated by Paul Heffner in an article in the Cog Counters Journal #19 Dec. 1982 accompanied by an example of the type of data he suggested be collected. Over the years, there was sporadic effort directed to the project. Don Slaght did the original research in 1984 on printers in Hartford, producing a document that listed printers with addresses for 25 years in the range of 1825-1860. He later listed printers in New Haven for the years 1840, 1845, and 1850.

Meanwhile, Mr. Heffner was collecting information on clock labels with several pleas to Cog Counter chapter members. Bryan Rogers restarted the quest for labels in the Cog Counters Journal of 2009.

In 2013, Dianna DeLucca, Editor of the NAWCC Bulletin, caused the label data to be transferred into an Excel workbook.

In 2020, Ted Orban slightly expanded the Hartford printer list, added 15 years of New Haven printers from 1841-1869, added all printers in New York City from 1786-1813, and supplemented the database with known label printers from many cities through 1869.

Finally, Mr. Orban transfered the two collections to a MySQL database and created these web pages to connect the databases. The objective was two-fold: to make the data more easily accessible - and thus more useful - and to make it easy to collect more labels.