Scottish Strengths in Publishing

Blackie and Sons

John Blackie

Glasgow based Blackie and Sons (established in 1809 but amalgamated as a family concern in 1831) dominated overseas as well as local markets with its readers in grammar, arithmetic, history and geography, going on to develop a fearsome reputation in the 1880s for high quality, morally sound children's books by authors such as G.A. Henty and Bessie Marchant. It would survive through various mergers until 1991, when its operations were broken up and incorporated into various other companies – its children’s, academic and educational lists, for example, going to its former rival Nelson.

William Collins

Another Glasgow based firm similarly had success in non-fiction works. William Collins (1789-1853) began publishing religious works in 1819, but also diversified into educational publishing, becoming one of the leading suppliers of school textbooks in Britain. Collins’s initiatives in religious, educational and textbook publishing proved so successful that by 1875 the firm boasted a workforce of over 1200, producing more than 1.3 million books printed and bound per year. Of all Scottish publishers, Collins proved to be the most durable and flexible, remaining in family hands until 1981, then fighting off mergers until 1989, when it was taken over by News International and merged with the equally venerably aged New York publishers Harper & Row to become HarperCollins, headquartered in New York but with a warehouse, reference and cartographic base in Glasgow.

Bartholomew & Son Cartographers

A particular strength of Scottish publishers was cartography, with one of its main exponents Bartholomew, founded in Edinburgh in 1830 by John Bartholomew (1805-1861). The firm gained momentum under the direction of John’s son, also John Bartholomew (1831-1893), who expanded the firm’s commercial range. Capitalising on the need for new maps and atlases to meet the mid-century boom in exploration and colonial expansion, Bartholomew & Son became pioneers in cartography, devising new techniques for the production of contoured and layered colour topographical maps. The firm also undertook commissions for medical and botanical illustrations and Bartholomew even worked with novelists on creating literary map classics, most notably designing the famous frontispiece map for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (published in 1883) By the 1880s, there were few British geographical, medical and botanical works that did not have a map, engraving or lithographic illustration produced in Edinburgh either by Bartholomew or by W. & A.K. Johnston. Bartholomews merged with HarperCollins in the 1990s.

D.C. Thomson

W & D C Thomson, Letterpress and Lithographic Printers

In Dundee a family empire was begun in the 1870s when the Dundee ship-owner William Thomson invested in a firm that published the Dundee Courier and Argus. In 1886 he took over the company, installed his son D.C. Thomson as general manager, and renamed it W & D.C. Thomson. Other family members joined the firm in following years, including D.C. Thomson’s brother Frederick and several nephews. By 1905 the firm changed name once more to D.C. Thomson & Co., Ltd., having embedded itself firmly as one of Dundee’s famous and most successful exports (‘jute, jam and journalism’). Over the coming decades it would undertake ambitious expansionary steps: launching the Evening Post in 1900; starting the Sunday Post in 1914; merging the Dundee Advertiser with the Dundee Courier in 1926; purchasing and rebranding the monthly Scots Magazine in 1927; and in 1937 begin publishing Scotland’s most successful children’s comics, the Dandy, followed shortly afterwards by its equally successful companion, the Beano. D.C. Thomson continues to function to this day, a major employer and a major player in British printing and journalism world.

Publishing in Aberdeen

For a period in the twentieth century another regional publishing success could be found in Aberdeen. Arthur King and Co., started in the late 1840s, would through management buyouts and redevelopment be transformed by 1900 into the Aberdeen University Press. Staff expansion was also rapid: from 20 staff in 1872, to 60 in 1887, to over 200 in 1904. The firm specialised in jobbing printing, doing commissioned work for publishers down south such as Allen & Unwin, Batsford, Constable and Co., The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, and Mills & Boon. It also had close links to Aberdeen University, publishing academic works and journals edited by University staff, and published bestselling reference works such as the Concise Scots Dictionary. Bought over by Robert Maxwell’s Pergamon Press Group in 1978, it ended its working life in 1992, closed down as one of the many casualties of the collapse of Maxwell’s publishing empire.

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