On 15 September 1507, James IV of Scotland granted Walter Chepman, an Edinburgh merchant, and his business partner Androw Myllar, a bookseller, the first royal licence for printing in Scotland. Although the licence was actually granted to enable the printing of the Aberdeen breviary, a book of Scottish church practices and the lives of local saints, complied by William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen, The Complaint of the Black Knight by John Lydgate, is the first known work from the press set up by Chepman and Myllar, printed on 4 April 1508 near what is now Edinburgh’s Cowgate. Images of works printed by Chepman and Myllar prints held at the National Library of Scotland are available on the Scotland’s first printed books website. Myllar was trained in France and the French influence on early Scottish printing was a strong one.
The spread of the printing beyond Edinburgh was gradual – St Andrews 1552; Stirling 1571; Aberdeen 1622, Glasgow 1638 and Leith 1651. You can look for the first printing offices in towns throughout Scotland on the Spread of Printing in Scotland web feature.
In its early years the printing industry was controlled by whichever printing office held the appointment as King’s Printers: no other printers could operate without a licence from the King’s Printers. This system lapsed at the beginning of the 18th century and Scotland’s printing industry, still centred largely in Edinburgh, entered a period of real growth.
The output of journals, books, newspapers and commercial print of all kinds increased still more rapidly following the introduction of iron presses and power-driven machinery in the 19th century. Supply industries, including papermaking, typefounding, ink-making and machine building grew, supplying not only the Scottish industry, but also the rest of the UK, and exporting throughout the world. The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the arrival of mechanical typesetting. You can read more about book and newspaper printing in Scotland on this page.
As well as the long-established processes of relief printing using letterpress and wood blocks, and engraving on metal plates, new processes such as lithography were adopted. Photographic processes were introduced offering more opportunity for the production of illustrations. Hot-metal typesetting was introduced at the end of the 19th century, and the newer process of offset lithography finally overtook letterpress as the dominant process for the reproduction of text in the mid-20th century.
Over the centuries, the printing trade has called for many different skills to produce a huge range of sizes and types of materials. In general those that survived from the earliest period were books which are protected by their bindings. However, with the technical innovations and improvements from the nineteenth century on, and the process of industrialisation, the demand for print grew enormously. As well as books of all shapes and sizes, and periodicals and newspapers, printed forms, posters, labels, tickets and invoices, together with all other varieties of ephemera poured from small local presses, while in larger centres, branches of the printing trade became specialised, for example with firms such as J & J Murdoch & John Watson specialising in printing labels for whisky and spring water in Glasgow, and postcard printing by Valentines of Dundee. Other specialisms included map printers John Bartholmew of Edinburgh and Simplicity Patterns (for dressmaking) in Blantyre.
Other important sectors of the Scottish printing industry have included:
- Packaging such as cardboard cartons, and more recently plastics
- Magazines and comics
- Braille
- Banknotes, stamps and cheques
- Posters
