Printing as Industry

The industrial history of Scottish printing in the nineteenth century is unusually well documented. Firms' records, union rule books, trade journals such as the Scottish Typographical Circular, census returns and the parish reports of the New Statistical Account have been brought together in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Volume 3: Ambition and Industry 1800–1880 (2007). Its chapters on printing by Trevor Howard-Hill, on typefounding and binding by John Morris, and its census appendix by Ross Alloway are the main sources for the nineteenth-century sections of this card. Census figures for occupations begin only in 1841 and are approximate, since categories changed between censuses. Founding dates for some firms vary between sources and are flagged where they do. The causes of the late-twentieth-century contraction are not reduced to a single documented explanation.

From hand press to steam

established In 1800 Scottish printing was a workshop trade. Of the fifty most populous towns in the first Statistical Account, only nineteen had had a printer before 1800. Country printers were usually a master and perhaps his son, and most needed a second living: Robert Wood of Lanark also ran a circulating library and an insurance agency, and John Nicholson of Kirkcudbright sold musical instruments and tea. A local newspaper often made the difference between success and failure. James Ballantyne began as proprietor of the Kelso Mail in 1795, and the Inverness printer John Johnstone founded the Inverness Courier in 1817 and edited it with his wife Christian.

established The wooden "common" press, worked by two pressmen, gave about 240 impressions an hour. Iron presses followed. The first British ones, built about 1803 to the Earl Stanhope's design, managed about 250 an hour. John Duncan of Glasgow's Villafield Press introduced the American Columbian iron press, the first in Scotland, around 1819. The Scottish engineer David Napier, based in London, built improved machines for export, including a double-feeder press introduced at Ballantyne's in 1830 that became "the most popular press of the kind in the trade". Robert Gunn of Edinburgh designed a steam-driven double-cylinder machine, built by Claud Girdwood & Company in Glasgow, claimed to print about 2,300 impressions an hour.

established Who first ran a steam press in Scotland is not recorded with certainty: one obituary credits Ballantyne's machinist William Tofts, another source credits William Fraser of Neill's. The Scotsman was printing by steam from 1831. By 1860 it had a ten-cylinder Hoe "lightning" press producing 10,000 complete, folded copies an hour, and in 1871 it bought three Walter presses, each capable of 12,000 an hour. In 1850 Thomas Nelson junior built a steam rotary press fed by a continuous web of paper that printed 10,000 sheets an hour on both sides. He judged it unsuited to book work and went no further, overlooking its potential for newspapers.

Stereotype and lithography

established Stereotyping, casting a whole page of type as a solid plate, came into its own once high-speed rotary presses arrived. It reached Edinburgh printing offices in 1825, introduced by Duncan Stevenson of the University Printing Office and James Gall. James Dellagana's curved casting box of 1861, which made plates to fit a rotary cylinder, opened the way to very large newspaper runs. By 1865 twelve firms were stereotyping in Edinburgh. Chambers used it from 1832: plates of Chambers's Edinburgh Journal were cast in Edinburgh and sent weekly to London to be printed there by steam.

established Glasgow became the centre of lithography, printing from a flat stone. The technique was described to Scots in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1817. In 1825 there were six lithographic businesses in Edinburgh and five in Glasgow; by 1870 there were sixty in Edinburgh and 122 in Glasgow. Hugh Wilson, listed as a lithographic printer in Glasgow from 1829, was running 300 hand presses and 120 steam presses in 1877. Lithography transformed jobbing work, from circulars and funeral notices to bills of lading and labels.

The great firms

established Edinburgh came to dominate. Neill & Co, founded in 1749, added typefounding in 1830 and stereotyping in 1843, and lasted until 1973. Ballantyne's, Scott's printers, employed 44 compositors and five pressmen in 1843 and 94 compositors and 32 press or machine men in 1875. Oliver & Boyd, founded in 1807–08, was the first of the great Edinburgh firms to keep large-scale printing, binding and publishing in one building. Blackwood's began printing its own magazine in its George Street works in January 1847. Thomas Nelson & Sons moved to purpose-built premises at Hope Park in 1845, introduced a series of technical innovations, and lost the works to fire in 1878, with damage put at £100,000 to £200,000; it was producing again in temporary premises within two months and moved to the new Parkside Works in 1880.

established In Glasgow, Blackie and Collins were both founded by former weavers. John Blackie built a business selling large works in parts, using stereotype plates so that instalments could be printed as sales demanded. William Collins began in partnership with Charles Chalmers, brother of the churchman Thomas Chalmers, in 1819, won a licence to print Bibles in 1842, and introduced lithography in 1856. By 1875 Collins employed more than 1,200 people and produced more than 1.3 million books a year; by 1882 it had twenty double-cylinder machines and fourteen lithographic presses.

established Scottish printers worked for the whole British market. The low prices of firms such as R. & R. Clark of Edinburgh and James MacLehose of Glasgow drew London publishers north, and by the mid-nineteenth century the "Edinburgh scale" had become the standard by which British printers estimated their costs.

Typefounding

established Type was cast by hand from punches and copper matrices in a lead, tin and antimony alloy. In 1800 Scotland's main typefounder was the Wilson foundry in Glasgow, whose types had first been made for the Foulis Press. With almost a monopoly in Scotland and Ireland, it moved to London in 1834. Its successor in Scottish dominance was William Miller, who had trained at Wilson's and opened a foundry in an Edinburgh back court in 1807. Miller & Richard, as the firm became in 1838, won the contract to cast the tiny "pearl" type for Bradshaw's railway timetables and supplied many newspapers, The Times among them.

established The face now called "Scotch Roman" derives from modern designs that the English punchcutter Richard Austin cut for both the Wilson and Miller foundries. Miller & Richard's Old Style of 1860, possibly cut by the Edinburgh-trained Alexander Phemister, was copied by typefounders in Britain and the United States and set a fashion for decades. The firm used typecasting machines from 1849, and when it put them throughout the works in 1864 the founders struck. The Scottish Typographical Circular reported that their places were being filled by unskilled men able after "a few weeks practice" to do much of the regular hands' work. The firm closed in 1952.

A workforce larger than England's

established Occupations were recorded in the census from 1841. The print and allied trades, which included papermaking, printing, typefounding, publishing, bookselling and librarianship, employed 7,195 people in 1841 and grew by 84 per cent in the following decade. Over 1841–1901 they grew on average by 35 per cent a decade, against 11 per cent for the population, rising from 0.73 per cent of the Scottish workforce in 1851 to over 2 per cent in 1901. On average Scotland had a 26 per cent higher share of its workforce in these trades than England and Wales, and the county of Edinburgh a 68 per cent higher share than London. Edinburghshire averaged 5.1 per cent of its workforce in the trades; Aberdeenshire, at 1.9 per cent, came ahead of Lanarkshire at 1.7 per cent.

Chapels, unions and the tramp

shared Printing was hard and unhealthy work. Edinburgh compositors complained in 1804 of being "confined in an unwholesome house… employed in arranging and composing poisonous materials", and tuberculosis was common. In 1804 they petitioned the Court of Session for a pay rise, and the court's scale of 1805 governed compositors' pay across Scotland for some five decades. It was the first wage increase in the trade won by collective action. The basic unit of organisation was the chapel, the journeymen of a single office presided over by the Father of the Chapel.

established Typographical societies followed: Glasgow in 1817, Edinburgh in 1824, and a national General Typographical Association of Scotland in 1836, with fifteen branches and over 700 members by 1843. Its main fight was over cheap apprentices. In January 1847 it backed a dispute against 38 Edinburgh employers; more than 150 men were discharged and most left the city. Glasgow rebuilt the movement as the Scottish Typographical Association in 1852, which had over 1,000 members by 1860 and 1,540 by 1870. Unemployed members were licensed to "tramp" from town to town for work or relief; the system overwhelmed societies on the main routes and was abolished in 1877. As presses grew more complex, pressmen became engineers. In 1866 the Scottish Typographical Circular said the Edinburgh pressman had risen "from the grade of an able-bodied labourer to the rank of an artist".

Women at the case

established In 1861 the Scottish National Institute for Promoting the Employment of Women in Printing opened the Caledonian Press at 4 South David Street, Edinburgh, with eight girl apprentices and three journeymen, led by Mary Anne Thomson of Lasswade. It employed fourteen women by 1863 and printed the magazine The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle, but failed commercially and was offered for sale in 1865.

established The breakthrough came from a defeat. In 1872 the Edinburgh compositors struck for a 51-hour week and higher piece and overtime rates. The masters broke the strike with non-union labour from England, apprentices and, for the first time in significant numbers, women; one employer trained girls from the Merchant Company's schools. By 1875 Edinburgh had 114 female compositors against 1,054 men: 35 at Neill's, 28 at Ballantyne's, and 18 each at R. & R. Clark and Murray & Gibb. One compositor in ten was a woman, a ratio then unequalled anywhere. By 1901, 31 per cent of the printers in the county of Edinburgh were women.

established The union fought back. In 1910 the Scottish Trades Union Congress unanimously condemned "the pernicious system of employing females as cheap labour to compete against adult male labour" and backed the Scottish Typographical Association's efforts "to eliminate it from their trade in Edinburgh". In 1903 the Glasgow branch had stopped funding the Scottish Council for Women's Trades because it was advising women that work on the new line and mono typesetting machines might suit them. The historian Eleanor Gordon cites these episodes to show how firmly the labour movement held that skilled work belonged to men.

Decline and the technology shift

shared The contraction of Scottish printing as a mass-manufacturing industry was sharpest in the 1970s and 1980s, alongside the wider deindustrialisation of UK manufacturing. Hot-metal typesetting and letterpress gave way to offset lithography and later to digital typesetting and printing, each step cutting the labour needed. International competition added pressure on firms that had not modernised. Available sources do not separate how much of the decline was due to technology, competition or wider deindustrialisation, so this card treats the causes as overlapping.

Present-day legacy

established Scottish printing today is far smaller, consolidated around commercial print, packaging and specialist work. Some historic names survive in changed form, most visibly William Collins within the HarperCollins group. Edinburgh marked 500 years of printing and publishing in 2008 with a virtual museum and archive project.

• By 1845 W. & R. Chambers was reputed to print as many sheets in a week as the whole Scottish press had produced in a month a decade earlier.
• In 1822 Ballantyne's, still working hand presses, printed 145,000 volumes of Walter Scott's works.
• Miller & Richard of Edinburgh cast the tiny "pearl" type used for Bradshaw's railway timetables.
• In 1850 Thomas Nelson junior built a rotary press that could print 10,000 sheets an hour on both sides, then shelved it.
• Glasgow had 122 lithographic printing businesses by 1870, double Edinburgh's sixty.
• In 1875 Neill & Co employed 35 women compositors, more than any other Edinburgh firm.
• Out-of-work printers once "tramped" from town to town on union licences in search of work; the Scottish union abolished the system in 1877.
• In 1841 only four of the 1,181 printers in the county of Edinburgh were women; by 1901 nearly a third were.

• Do not say Thomas Nelson & Sons was founded in 1789. Sources give dates between 1811 and 1818 for Thomas Nelson's start in business; the name Thomas Nelson & Sons dates from 1839.
• Do not credit William Ged with discovering stereotyping without qualification; The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland treats his experiments as one of several in the eighteenth century.
• Do not name a single first user of steam printing in Scotland; the claims for Ballantyne's and Neill's are both undated.
• Do not attribute the 1970s–80s decline to a single cause; it reflected changing technology, competition and wider deindustrialisation together.
• Do not treat nineteenth-century census figures as exact; occupational categories changed between censuses.
• Keep this card's industrial focus distinct from Scotland's literary publishing history, which is covered elsewhere.