How printing in Scotland started
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. It was put on display by the National Archives of Scotland to mark the 500th anniversay of the grant
www.nas.gov.uk/about/070914.asp
The first printed book from this press with a definite date was a vernacular poem by John Lydgate 'The Complaint of the Black Knight' which was printed on 4 April 1508 on the press they had set up, near what is now Edinburgh's Cowgate. The only known copy is held in the National Library of Scotland's collections. However, the licence was actually granted to enable the printing of the far more serious 'Aberdeen breviary', a book of Scottish church practices and the lives of local saints, complied by William Elphinstone, Bishop of Aberdeen (1431-1514).
Images of the Chepman and Myllar prints can be found on www.nls.uk/firstscottishbooks/index.html
The Edinburgh University Library website features the Aberdeen Breviary of 1510 at
www.lib.ed.ac.uk/resources/collections/specdivision/
ch200803.shtml
Cambridge University Library have put their fragment of Richard Holland's Buke of the Howlat, printed by Chepman & Myllar in 1508, on the web: www.lib.cam.ac.uk/deptserv/rarebooks/featuredbook.html
On Friday 4 April 2008, the 500th anniversary of the printing of The Complaint of the Black Knight was marked by
- a commemorative plaque unveiled at the corner of Blackfriars Street and the Cowgate near the site of Scotland's first printing press
- a modern press was sited on Princes Street printing souvenir posters
- only known copy of Scotland's first dated printed book was put on display to the public at the National Library of Scotland
- a website showing the spread of printing across Scotland was launched www.nls.uk/printing/
- a public day of printing at Dundee Contemporary Arts, based on the text and printers' devices from The Complaint of the Black Knight, culminating in a public reading of the poem www.500years.co.uk
- a celebratory dinner in the University of Edinburgh's Playfair Library Hall www.hss.ed.ac.uk/chb/500years.htm
Printing spread gradually through Scotland, with a press established in St Andrews in 1552, a short-lived one in Stirling in 1571 and in Aberdeen in 1622, with other major towns such as Glasgow following later in the seventeenth century. special.lib.gla.ac.uk/exhibns/gupress/gupresshome.html
www.scottishprintarchive.org/page.php?id=13
www.nls.uk/printing/
The impact of print on medicine in Scotland has been highlighted in a website related to exhibitions which are part of the '500 years of printing programme'. Scotland and Medicine in Print illustrates Scotland's rich heritage in this area.
Originally printing techniques were imported from France, where Androw Myllar trained, but in later centuries some Scottish printers were responsible for technical innovations. In the late eighteenth century William Ged invented the stereotyping process, although his attempts to exploit it commercially were a failure and left him embittered, the process has been widely used since.
Thomas Nelson, son of the founder of Thomas Nelson & Sons, invented a rotary press: it was demonstrated at the Great Exhibition of 1855. As he did not patent his invention, he did not reap any financial benefit from an invention from which the newspaper presses in use for the next 100 years were descended.
Alexander Neill Fraser of the printing company Neill & Co, based in Edinburgh was an early pioneer of mechanical typesetting, inventing a machine for typesetting and distributing used type which predated the Monotype and Linotype systems. The machines were not only used in their own works, but were sold elsewhere well into the twentieth century.
World famous printer-publishers based in Scotland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries include Bartholomews, Blackie, Collins and Nelsons. A distinguished name from the eighteenth century is the Foulis Press of Glasgow, which produced beautifully typeset and carefully printed classical texts.
www.scottishprintarchive.org/
Other resources on the web include:
- a display of fine Scottish bindings
- Napier University's Edward Clark Collection on the history of printing
- the last Cossar press functioning in Scotland at the Strathearn Herald in 1991
- the Scottish pages of the Britain in print website
