Thomas Nelson and Sons: Memoirs of an Edinburgh Publishing House

Citation

Fraser, K.C. (2002), "Thomas Nelson and Sons: Memoirs of an Edinburgh Publishing House", Library Review, Vol. 51 No. 6, pp. 308-309. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2002.51.6.308.2

Librarians who looked only at the title of this book might form an incorrect idea of what it contains. It is, in the first place, a piece of oral history, compiled by SAPPHIRE, the Scottish Archive of Printing and Publishing History, a joint venture between Napier University and Queen Margaret University College, which is collecting information on the once powerful Scottish printing and publishing industry. Some of its results are now published as part of a series of oral histories of labour sponsored by the European Ethnological Research Centre.

But the choice of the four particular individuals featured in the book has the effect of skewing it towards one side of the firm’s activities. Two of the contributors were printers, one worked on the printing of photographs, and the other was eventually a warehouse manager. As Nelson’s of course printed the books they published, these four are probably representative of the bulk of the workforce, but this means there is virtually nothing in the book about the more intellectual side of publishing (apart from a short historical introduction). It might better have had the subtitle “memories of an Edinburgh printing house”.

The picture of Nelson’s given by each of the four workers, covering the period from the 1930s to the 1960s, is quite compatible. The firm worked on a large scale, but without much originality and in a rather old‐fashioned way. “I don’t think they tried that hard”, says one. Another describes Nelson’s as “kind of sleepy” and says “nobody liked change”. Staff were usually related to someone already on the payroll: they joined straight from school and often stayed beyond the normal retiring age. Workers were respected by their peers outside as having a skilled trade. The print unions were strongly supported, but not militant. The machinery was frequently antiquated. Library school students of the present day will wonder at the descriptions of printing methods, some of which may seem to them as old as Gutenberg. While not much is said about the higher management, which was strict but paternalistic, it appears they thrived on vast print runs of textbooks and classics, which seldom varied, and if ever the presses threatened to be idle, would resort to an order for another 5,000 copies of Treasure Island or whatever, confident that it would sell somehow. If this is correct, it is hardly surprising that in the end the firm was taken over by Lord Thomson (“an asset‐stripper, basically” opines one contributor) and not long afterwards the work was transferred elsewhere. How are the mighty fallen!

The book is more than a mere chronicle of old‐fashioned printing methods, for the contributors also describe their relationships on the factory floor, and the social life that went with it. I particularly liked the description of how the apprentices had a plan of the print shop on the wall, with a little flag which was regularly moved about to show where the foreman was at any given time, so that they could, if need be, avoid his prying eye. Like the others in the series, this book will keep alive the memories of an important sector of Scotland’s industrial past. For librarians in particular, it will put some flesh on the bones of printing history.