The 24th Lithography Workshop was located at Kronverkskaia and Mir Streets in St. Petersburg (Petrograd). Historically, the workshop had its roots in Imperial Russia and it was a large printing operation founded in 1881 by Theodore Kibbel (Fedor Fyodorovich Kibbel). Shortly after the printer was nationalized by the Soviets, it became the 1st State Lithography Workshop. In 1924, the workshop was named in honor of Mikhail Pavlovich Tomskii (1880-1936), head of the Soviet trade union and the head of the State Publishing House. During the early 1930s, the printer was reorganized as the 24th Lithography Workshop of Ogiz (Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers) and was placed under the management of the Poligrafkniga (Book and Magazine Printing) state printing trust.

Ugletekhizdat (State Scientific and Technical Publishing House of Coal Industry Literature) was founded in the 1940s based on research of various periodicals it issued in that period. While its chief output consisted of technical manuals for the mining industry, Ugletekhizdat also published a complement of posters related to that industry in the Soviet Union.