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A REPUTATION FOR EXCELLENCE
A History of the Edinburgh Printing Industry
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Decline and Development
Neill & Co. moved from their old, cramped quar-ters at Old Fishmarket
Close to the new spacious Bellevue works at Canonmills in 1898,
becoming near neighbours to Morrison & Gibb who were based at
Tanfield. When the Bellevue works were destroyed by fire in 1916,
Neill & Co. moved to Ballantyne’s old factory at Causewayside
which had become vacant when Ballantyne’s merged with a London
company earlier that year. Neill’s further expanded in 1935
when they bought the Riverside printing company.
In 1930, against the general trend of the times, T. & A. Constable
moved into new, enlarged premises at Hopetoun Street.
In many ways the story of Morrison & Gibb is very similar to
that of Neil! & Co.: in 1896 they amalgamated with the firm
of Scott & Fergusson, a process they repeated three years after
their centenary (1928) when they took over the even older firm of
W. & A. K Johnston and again in 1932 when they took over Mould
& Tod Ltd. This last expansion was accompanied by the erection
of a large new building adjacent to the Tanfield works forming a
two-acre site within which all of the stages in the production of
a book could be carried out from typesetting to binding.
Among all of these changes, however, something of the ‘Edinburgh
Tradition’ of high quality work and a particularly close relationship
with the author did survive: R & R Clark maintained a long and
happy relationship with George Bernard Shaw from 1898 until his
death in 1950.
In 1946, when he was approached by Penguin for permission to publish
a series of ten of his plays, Shaw stipulated one condition: that
‘Clarks of Edinburgh must do the printing.’ One hundred
thousand copies of each were produced in record time:
The ending of the Second World War did not herald a quick return
to normality for Edinburgh printing houses, largely because of the
continuing shortages of raw materials. Apart from the economy war-time
restrictions which continued for some years, returning servicemen
found little had changed and there were certainly few, if any, signs
of the tremendous technological developments which lay ahead. Monotype
composition and letterpress printing were the main processes for
bookwork and commercial houses, with offset printing largely confined
to map printing and a small number of commercial houses.
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Volume 1, published 1990
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