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A REPUTATION FOR EXCELLENCE
A History of the Edinburgh Printing Industry
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The Era of Industrialisation
Thomas Oliver began his printing career in a humble way, composing
type upon his mother’s hearth-stone. Twenty years later, in
1808, he took on as a partner a bookbinder by the name of George
Boyd, so giving rise to what was to become one of the longest lasting
and most famous of Edinburgh printing firms. Originally based in
various buildings around the High Street, Oliver & Boyd moved
to their premises in Tweeddale Court in 1820. The firm worked closely
with James Hogg, John Gait and Thomas Carlyle and specialised in
the publish-ing of Scottish poetry. By 1836 they were the first
firm in Edinburgh to combine printing bookbinding and publishing
on a large scale within a single building.
Another long lasting firm, T. & A. Constable, had their origins
in this period. Archibald Constable, the publisher, married the
daughter of the printer David Willison and eventually inherited
his business, forming a joint printing and publishing enterprise.
As a whole the eighteenth century is dominated by the Glasgow firm,
the Foulis Press, whose impressively accurate and beautifully printed
editions of classical texts gave Scottish printing for the first
time, an international reputation for excellence. It is also the
period which, in its later stages marks the emergence of printing
as a major industry rather than a small scale craft; one of the
firms in the forefront of this development was that of James Ballantyne
and Co.
Founded in Kelso in 1796, Ballantyne’s enjoyed a particularly
close relationship with Sir Walter Scott. This began when James
Ballantyne printed a run-off of Scott’s An Apology for Tales
of Terror as a sample for Edinburgh publishers. Archibald Constable
was sufficiently impressed to instruct this new company to proceed
with Scott’s Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, which was to
be widely praised for, among other things, the high quality of its
printing. It was while the Minstrelsy was being printed that the
firm moved from the Borders to Edinburgh in 1802. At first setting
up near Holyrood, they next moved to Foulis Close in the Canongate
before settling in Paul’s Work, north back of Canongate, at
the foot of Calton Hill.
In many respects Ballantyne’s was typical of the general trend
of printing in nineteenth century Edinburgh, enjoying a close relationship
with author and publisher, a good reputation for high quality work
and combining this with a very large output of books. In Ballantyne’s
case this can be seen in the handling of Scott’s Waverley which
was an immediate and massive success and brought the Paul’s
Work plant to capacity production. The relationship between Ballantyne,
Scott and Constable was too close, however, and when Constable’s
collapsed in 1826 both James Ballantyne and Scott were also bankrupted.
The resulting debts were to kill Scott when, in an attempt to pay
them off, he worked himself to death.
In 1833 T. & A. Constable moved to bigger premises in Thistle
Street under the supervision of Thomas Constable, their new director.
Two years later he was made King’s Printer, in 1859 printer
to Edinburgh University and, in 1869, his son Archibald maintained
the family honour by being made, in turn, King’s Printer.
Another famous Edinburgh printing firm began its long history soon
after T. & A. Constable. R. & R. Clark was founded in 1846
and went on to play a prominent role in Edinburgh’s printing
life, enjoy-ing particularly close relationships with the authors
Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and George Bernard Shaw.
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Volume 1, published 1990
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