Printing companies

Scot­land’s print­ing com­pa­nies include many famil­iar names: Black­ie & Co, W& R Cham­bers, Williams Collins, T & A Con­sta­bles, Thomas Nel­son and Valen­tines. Com­pa­nies often pro­duced print­ed brochures or com­pa­ny his­to­ries to mark impor­tant points in their his­to­ry. Some of these have been scanned with the help of stu­dents in the School of Arts and Cre­ative Indus­tries at Edin­burgh Napi­er Uni­ver­si­ty. Every effort has been made to trace copy­right hold­ers: if you have any infor­ma­tion about cur­rent copy­right hold­ers for any of these items, please email the sec­re­tary.

Aberdeen

• Aberdeen Uni­ver­si­ty Press: Iain Bea­van’s arti­cle from the Jour­nal of the Edin­burgh Bib­li­o­graph­i­cal Soci­ety; a list of the archival sources in Aberdeen Uni­ver­si­ty Library’s Spe­cial Col­lec­tions; back­ground to the relaunched AUP in 2014.
• Arthur King — mem­oirs of an appren­tice [PDF 9.4Mb]

Dundee

• Harley and Cox [PDF 4.3Mb]
• Valen­tine: infor­ma­tion about the com­pa­ny archive for the post­card printers

Edin­burgh

• Bartholomew fam­i­ly web­site, and com­pa­ny archive. You can also explore the Dun­can Street premis­es in Edin­burgh’s New­ing­ton dis­trict, occu­pied by the firm from 1911 to 1995
• fea­ture on W & R Cham­bers, on the Nation­al Muse­ums Scot­land web­site includ­ing infor­ma­tion on the print­ing meth­ods used
• R & R Clark Ltd: short his­to­ry. There is also an account of the social life of the firm on YouTube
• T & A Con­sta­ble [PDF 5.9Mb]
• W & A K John­ston: 100 years of map mak­ing [PDF 7.1Mb]
• McLa­gan & Cum­ming [PDF 3.1Mb]
• Mor­ri­son & Gibb Ltd: short his­to­ry
• Wad­dies [PDF 15.9Mb]

Glas­gow

• Black­ie: archive
• MacLe­hose: vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tion and archive col­lec­tion

Oth­er

• Allen Lith­o­graph­ic Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed, Kirk­caldy Our Progress in Print [PDF 18.9Mb]
• Robert Cun­ning­ham and Sons, Alva, 40th Anniver­sary [PDF 3.5Mb] and 50th Anniver­sary book­lets [PDF 5Mb]
• Nei­d­path Press, Pee­bles
• Robert Smail’s Print­ing Works Archive, Inner­lei­then