500 years of Scottish printing

Privately Printed in the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art Department of Printing. This brief account of the origin and development of Printing in Scotland was written for the Scottish Committee of the Council of Industrial Design in connection with the Exhibition held in the Royal Scottish Museum in and is reprinted with the consent of the Council.

Scotland is relatively a small country, and anything in connection with the history of printing in Scotland must be regarded in the light of the conditions of the country and the conditions of the people. Scottish printing began in Edinburgh early in the sixteenth century, in 1507, and in that century there were troubled times - the Reformation, John Knox, Mary Queen of Scots. In the seventeenth century there were further troubles with Charles I, Oliver Cromwell and Charles II; right through the middle of the seventeenth century there was much unrest, leading to the National Covenant of 1638 and the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643. The Covenanters form a great page in Scottish history, and the Battle of Rullion Green was fought near Edinburgh in 1666. The eighteenth century was marked by the Risings in 1715 and 1745, but the latter part of that century became more settled and was marked by great developments, particularly in Edinburgh when the New Town began to take shape. The nineteenth century saw the growth of machinery and the Industrial Revolution, a rapid expansion of cities and towns, and the great progress of the Victorian era. One has to keep the troubled history of Scotland in view in any survey of the development of Scottish printing. In the early part of the nineteenth century there were no railways: canals, steam packets and horse-drawn vehicles forming the mode of transport. In the magnificent Victorian era development was not always beautiful but on a very large scale, and the printing trade has its own important phases and great advances.

The beginning of Scottish printing was in Edinburgh in 1507, when the Bishop of Aberdeen was anxious to get a breviary published, and persuaded King James IV to have a printing press set up, where Chepman and Myllar began to print in 1508.