Bartholomew Archive Blog

On the 25th August, 1939, John Bartholomew and Son printed 10,347 copies of their ‘Automobile Association Map of England and Wales’. As far as maps go, I think it’s fair to say it’s not exactly anything to write home about. Stripped away of any extraneous information, beyond the roads themselves, the strictly black and white map is rather clinical, resembling a diagram of the human circulatory system.

Whilst undoubtedly of interest to some, I fear this map would make for a somewhat uninspiring blog article, so luckily for me, things really pick up when you turn the map over.

The reverse of this map is devoted to at-length descriptions of the Automobile Association, and the assorted benefits of membership. Perhaps the one we are most familiar with is the patrol service, providing motorists with assistance in their hour of need. In 1939, the service looked like this.

The accompanying text informs readers that the road patrol service is the first of its kind in the world, with officers patrolling on motorbikes with side cars, or pedal cycles. Equipped with tools, petrol and a fire extinguisher, they were surely well armed to tackle any emergency.

Of course, in a time where mobile telephones were possibly beyond the realms of any imagination, contacting the patrol might have been a tricky business. But not so, as the AA proudly provided its members with access to roadside telephone boxes.

In truth, a lot of care and attention appears to have gone into this service, with phone boxes specifically located on main roads where telephones were scare or on roads described as ‘passing through lonely areas’. The telephone boxes were all fitted with an identical lock, and AA membership included a key, to allow members access to this invaluable communication link. A card inside included details of the nearest AA approved garages as well as those of local hotels, doctors and the nearest ambulance service. Although local calls were free of charge, an honesty box operated for those making trunk or toll calls.

One thing I hadn’t realised the AA took charge of was road signage, but this is yet another service proudly boasted about on the reverse of the map.

The text says, ‘In the early days of motoring, many of the signposts – where they existed – were in a more or less dilapidated condition’. From 1907, the AA undertook to improve the situation by installing their own signposts. By 1939, this totalled over 100,000.

Then finally, something that really was a revelation to me, the AA’s aviation department.

Launched in 1928, this department worked in collaboration with the Royal Aero Club, to provide aviators with ‘extensive air touring facilities’. This included their Air Route Maps, another type of map publication which Bartholomew printed.

To end, another interesting point of note; just seven days after this map was printed, Germany invaded Poland, leading to the start of the Second World War.

On the 7 December 2012 our exhibition of Bartholomew Archive material will open in our George IV Bridge building. Putting Scotland on the Map: The World of John Bartholomew and Son will explore the techniques and processes by which Bartholomew brought their maps to life. By way of a little teaser, I would like to give you a small glimpse into the complex world of map compilation.

This photograph shows Bartholomew’s draughtsman in their Park Road office. It was taken in 1895 but it shows people performing tasks which, in many respects, changed little for the next 50 to 60 years.

Some map publishers, such as Ordnance Survey, conduct ground or aerial surveys to gather the information they need for their maps. Bartholomew gathered the information that they needed via a process called compilation. Compilation is where the draughtsman’s role began. This was but one of the many elements to the draughtsman’s role, which made it one of the most specialist positions in the firm.

Draughtsmen had a lot of different resources to hand when it came to compiling information. Bartholomew kept a vast collection of reference maps and atlases produced by their competitors such as Ordnance Survey. Although Bartholomew did not plagiarize these works, studying the maps of others could reveal changes to natural and man-made features that Bartholomew might chose to incorporate into their own maps. They also kept a large collection of newspaper clippings. Whenever a story touched upon a pertinent subject, such as the building of a new road, the demolition of a bridge or the redrawing of an international boundary, Bartholomew would cut out and keep the story for future reference. This article, which details the post-war changes to London following the Blitz, is a poignant example.

But by far the biggest source of information was the vast amount of correspondence sent to Bartholomew every day. In some cases members of the public would volunteer information, sometimes including a hand-drawn map of their own, or an annotated clipping from one of Bartholomew’s maps. In other cases the relationship was more formal. This is perhaps best demonstrated by Bartholomew’s relationship with the Cyclist’s Touring Club.

The Cyclist’s Touring Club (CTC) was founded in 1878 and by the end of the 1890s boasted membership figures of close to 60,500. This then was a desirable market for Bartholomew, as CTC members actively sought useful, accurate and cycle friendly maps for their excursions. In 1898 John George Bartholomew (the firm’s director at the time) sought to capitalise on this market and wrote to the CTC’s Secretary with a proposal. Bartholomew would supply the CTC with discounted half inch maps but in return they requested that CTC members supplied the firm with up to date information. The benefit was therefore twofold; Bartholomew acquired a ready market for their maps but also, an army of thousands of people who toured the country and passed on information, for free, which the firm could then use to ensure their maps remained accurate. Although much of this correspondence is formal and business-like, some correspondents were a little more forthright, as this letter from 1915 demonstrates.

Bartholomew derived similar information from local surveyors, town planners, planning departments and other like agencies, complementing the information they received from members of the public.

Once this information had been collected the draughtsmen would either update a base map, or draw a new map from scratch and the next stage of the draughtsman’s work would begin.

If you would like to know what happened next, why not pop by the National Library of Scotland and visit Putting Scotland on the Map: The World of John Bartholomew and Son, a free exhibition open from 7 December 2012-7 May 2013.

Images © permission of Collins Bartholomew

The second instalment of our Bartholomew Archive Exhibition tasters looks back at one of the firm’s most recognisable premises – Duncan Street.

John George Bartholomew (1860-1920) moved his firm to Duncan Street in 1911. This was the fourth premises that John George would have been able to remember. He recalled the hustle and bustle of North Bridge, Bartholomew’s first commercial premises, which he experienced as a very small child. He undertook his apprenticeship at the firm’s next and first independent premises (North Bridge was shared) on Chambers Street. Then, as head of the firm, in 1889 he moved with the company to their biggest premises yet, on Park Road.

Park Road was an unhappy home for John George. Problems arose not so much because of the building, but because of the terms in which it was taken. Park Road was built by the publisher Thomas Nelson, who in 1888 entered into partnership with Bartholomew. For reasons we may never fully understand, John George found this partnership difficult. One explanation is that in order to pay Nelson back Bartholomew essentially acted as Nelson’s indentured printing concern. Perhaps it was the belief that this would curtail his freedom that troubled the imaginative and ambitious John George.

After twenty years at Park Road, John George began to plan his future, free from Nelson, in Duncan Street. This sketch by John George, of the Duncan Street building superimposed over a print of Park Road, perhaps reveals something of a man happy to be moving on.

Work began on Duncan Street in 1909 and by 1911 Bartholomew were moving in. The Bartholomew Archive is extremely lucky to have photographs of Duncan Street under construction. They are a little murky but they will show you this building in a way that few who are alive today will have seen it before.

The Archive goes even further than this and contains some extremely detailed information about this building. One item, a building abstract, shows us how much each element cost and the name of the firm that was contracted to do it. So, for example, we know that the roof slater was R. Kidd and that the cost was £251.10s. 5d (about £20,000 today).

Bartholomew celebrated the move with a flurry of promotional material, which of course included a map or two.

John George must surely have felt that Duncan Street was a home from home. And in fact, this is more true than it might seem. John George and his family had enjoyed many happy years in an Edinburgh home called Falcon Hall. Before this building was demolished, John George had the entire front portico taken down and rebuilt as the entrance to Duncan Street. Compare this picture of Falcon Hall below with that of Duncan Street above.

The firm stayed at Duncan Street until 1995, which marks almost 200 years of a Bartholomew business in Edinburgh.

This is but a wee snippet of the tale of Duncan Street, which we will explore in much more detail in our December 2012 to May 2013 exhibition, here at the National Library of Scotland. We look forward to seeing you there!

On the 24 December 1895 Bartholomew printed 675 copies of the Map of Scotland to Illustrate Mr Harvie Brown’s Paper on the Tufted Duck, 1896. This highly functional map is no looker, but it is yet one more example of the interesting use Bartholomew were asked (and keen) to make of maps.

The Mr Harvie Brown named in the title was John Alexander Harvie Brown of Dunipace (1844-1916), a Scottish gentleman naturalist. As a man of independent means he has been described as ‘able to devote his life to the traditional highland laird pursuits with rod and gun and to ornithology’. These days this may be seen as rather pejorative but Harvie Brown was no ornithological light-weight. Amongst the accomplishments which may be credited to him are the first studies of bird migration to make use of lighthouse keeper’s records; the creation, ownership and joint editing of The Annals of Scottish Natural History (still in print as the Scottish Naturalist) and the receipt of numerous honorary awards and memberships of societies.

He was also a prolific author, on occasion going to extraordinary efforts to get material for pen to paper. Unquestionably the most astonishing was that he built his own yacht, Shiantelle, on which he sailed the Scottish coast making observations. Such energetic escapades render all the more sad that at the end of his life, after extreme ill health, he became confined to one room in his home and weighing 25 stone.

Harvie Brown and John George Bartholomew had previosuly worked together on the extremely impressive  Naturalists Map of Scotland (1893). This was the sort of project that John George really felt passionate about. John George would later collaborate with another naturalist, Marcel Hardy, to produce the equally striking Botanical Survey of Scotland (1906).

The scholarly work to which this map is the illustrative accompaniment is perhaps a little dry to my non-specialist mind so for me, it is the creativity behind this map that takes centre stage. It is perhaps useful to remember that using maps in this way was a social construct borne of imagination and at this time, a relatively new phenomenon.

On the 31 March 1910, Bartholomew printed a proof version of the ‘conventional signs and styles of type for the international map on the scale of 1:1,000,000′. But what exactly is the International Map of the World?

The philosophy behind the idea reflected its late nineteenth century times. The venture was to be educational, edifying and essentially philanthropic; an international map of the world would ultimately benefit the common good of humanity.

The idea was proposed by German geographer and geologist, Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) during the 5th International Geographical Congress, held in Berne in 1891. There was a general feeling that the great period of exploration was coming to an end and that the time was right to consolidate the knowledge that had been gained. At its heart, Penck’s idea was simple - for the assorted national mapping agencies to work together to produce a map of the world, on a uniform scale, using common conventions and symbols.

A not inconsiderable time later, in November 1909, Penck’s idea finally began to creep closer to realisation. An Inaugural Conference was held, formally establishing the International Map Committee. Some 24 delegates met at the Conference, representing 11 nations. The United Kingdom contingent consisted of Lieutenant-Colonel C. F. Close, Head of the GSGS, Colonel S.C.N. Grant, Director General of  Ordnance Survey and Dr J. Scott Keltie, Secretary of the RGS.

Bartholomew may have lacked a presence on this committee but they were nevertheless called upon to produce the proof, and later the final copy, of the conventions and symbols that the International Map Committee had agreed upon.

The proof copy is slightly quirky, incidentally showing some of the pitfalls that could befall even Bartholomew, but by the final copy the lines were straight, the problems fixed.

History shows us that the International Map of the World was not to be. Essentially, it proved too difficult for these agencies to collaborate effectively, the final straw coming when the United States abandoned the project and decided to go it alone. However, fragments such as this proof serve to remind us what might have been.

Just for fun, the conventional symbols for assorted landscape features are shown below. Can you identify them? Answers on a postcard!

In the summer of 1891, John Bartholomew & Co. launched a cartographic tour de force whose sheer magnificence continues to awe. Bartholomew’s Plan of the City of Edinburgh with Leith and Suburbs. Reduced from the Ordnance Survey and Revised to the Present Date by John Bartholomew, or the Large Plan of Edinburgh & Leith, as it’s more usually known (for obvious, laconic reasons) is a map of superlatives.

It is comprised of twelve sheets that when viewed together measure 6ft. 4in. high by 5ft. 2in. wide. Work on it began in 1880, coming to fruition a mammoth 11 years later. The printing alone took 250 hours, utilising a total of 45 lithographic stones and requiring a total of 25,000 pulls (a pull being the number of times the paper goes through the printing press, once for the outline and then once for each colour). The work was staggered, Sheet 1 went to the press on 10 June 1891 and Sheet 12 on 18 June 1891. A modest 500 copies of each were printed but even so, the final cost was an astronomical £125 (£75 to produce the map and £50 in royalties). To put that into perspective, this would equate to around £13,500 by today’s standards. And this doesn’t even include the engraving costs, essentially comprised of staff wages, which add a further £75 to the total.

The prospectus describes this map as ‘the finest and most elaborate Map of the City and Suburbs ever produced’, and whilst the stringency of this statement might be hard to support, it is unquestionably a gorgeous and engaging map. What strikes one at first is the pleasing overall effect that the map has; a minty green softens the predominance of business-like shades of grey, and it sprawls itself languidly across the sheets when seen in its entirety. When seen up close it is no less impressive. As Leslie Gardener writes best in Bartholomew 150 Years, ‘Every lamp-post is dotted…so are the flower beds in the gardens, the garden sheds, the stairways and steps of the courts and closes…You may trace the seating arrangements in the Surgeon’s Hall, count the stalls in the Court of Session…and study the display cases in the Science Museum’.

This level of detail derives from the fact that the map is based on Ordnance Survey’s 5ft. to a mile map of Edinburgh, a 56 sheet cartographic behemoth. Bartholomew shrunk this to a more manageable 15 inches to a mile, but without diminishing the detail.

The printed maps are supplemented by the original copper plates, seen here spun by the power of technology, to show the plate ‘the right way round’.

I am not alone in being an ardent fan of this map, it has recently been scanned, stitched, geo-referenced and overlaid onto Google Maps in a project funded by Visualising Urban Geographies, ‘a project that provides mapping tools for historians’. This painstaking work, a labour of love, allows the maps to be viewed as a whole for the first time (the removal of the margins allows for seamless travel from one sheet to the next) whilst the overlaying allows 1891 Edinburgh to sit in contrast with 2011 Edinburgh. Do have a look, you will find the map here.

On the 24 June 1909 Bartholomew printed 20,400 copies of the Caledonian Railway Tourist Map. It is a handsome map with a pleasingly warm tone but what sets it apart is the superlative advertising that is printed on the reverse.

The twin demons of overseas travel, expense and environmental ethics, have placed holidaying within the United Kingdom firmly back on the side of acceptable. This no doubt renders the extravagant assertions that the advertising makes slightly more believable. The “land of health and pleasure” could be a modern day slogan.

There are quite a few modern day resonances as it happens. The emphasis on the benefits of the open air, the memories that you will keep, the promotion of travelling by public transport and not least of all, the overall frugality. It is almost as if the intervening 100 years didn’t happen.

Perhaps the biggest difference comes in the guise of the “Duchess of Argyll”, a sleek and nippy looking steam ship. That said, there is in fact one such ship still in operation, the “Waverley” which ferries enthusiastic time travellers down the Clyde from Glasgow to this day. Maybe recreating the experience of visitors in 1909 isn’t quite as hard as one might suppose.

The Emerald Isle Album series consisted of eleven albums of photographs with descriptive text of assorted interesting places in Ireland. On the 25 June 1897 Bartholomew printed 5148 covers and maps for The Emerald Isle Album of the City & County of Dublin.

This ornate cover bespeaks of the general quality this publication aspired to. It positively oozes class. Indeed the photographs contained within were of a type known as Platinotype, or Platinum Prints, regarded as providing the greatest tonal range of any chemical photographic process. An example of one of these albums, The Emerald Isle Album of Cork, Blarney & Queenstown can be found on the Fáilte Romhat website.

Whilst the cover demonstrates Bartholomew’s deftness with colour and technique it is probably the map which attracted the publisher who commissioned the work, William Strain & Son of Belfast, to them. In true Bartholomew style a pre-existing map was repurposed for this publication, expediting the job and keeping down the cost. Indeed, the cost for printing 5148 copies of cover and map was a suprising £7,10,0 or a paltry £631 by today’s standards.

In its sepia tone it is quite an unusual look for a Bartholomew map, although it retains the clarity that you would expect to see. But there is something old-fashioned about the look and feel of these items, even though they were capturing contemporary Dublin life. Could it be that this was a conscious effort to capture for one last time a world that was rapidly drawing to a close?

On the 23 October 1903, Bartholomew printed 2,040 sheets of maps destined for publication in the latest work by Harry de Windt. Harry de who? I hear you ask. Well, one of the best things about the Printing Record is that the maps it contains can reveal interesting but often forgotten stories of people, places and events, and Harry de Windt is no exception.

Harry de Windt was born in Paris in 1856, his full name being Harry Willes Darell de Windt. He occupied the higher echelons of French society, growing up in a villa that his mother had inherited from the Vicomte de Rastignac, his father was English. By the age of fourteen both of his parents had died and due to the Franco-Prussian war, which was ravaging France, he was sent to school in England. It was not long before the restlessness, which would come to characterise his life, came to the fore. His sister had married Sir Charles Vyner de Windt Brooke (1874–1963), the last Raja of Sarawak, and at the age of 16 Harry set sail to join the party as aide de camp to the Raja.

He returned to England with the intention of taking up a military career. However, his education had been somewhat eccentric, leaving him with little chance of gaining a commission. He was not a good scholar, describing his preference for wearing loud check suits, gambling, drinking and smoking over studying. He turned his attentions to horse racing for a while, before finally settling upon a career devoted to his first loves of travel and adventure.

He largely travelled as a correspondent for assorted newspapers, undertaking his first trip in 1887 from Peking to France. He followed this with trips from Russia to India, extensive travels in Siberia and a journey across eastern Europe which formed the basis of his somewhat defamatorily entitled work Through Savage Europe. Arguably however, his most famous and ambitious journey was the overland route from New York to Paris.

His first attempt almost ended in disaster after he encountered difficulties in the Bering Strait. He underestimated local knowledge and attempted the crossing from America to Asia on foot, disregarding warnings about the inconsistent nature of the ice. He would have died were it not for the timely intervention of a passing whaling ship, although he later recalled this rescue with faint praise, condemning the ship for the smell of boiling blubber.

However, his spirit was indomitable and in 1901/02 he once again attempted the journey. He travelled in the opposite direction, from Paris to New York, and was successful. In the preface to the subsequent book of the journey (for which Bartholomew produced these maps) he cites two reasons for the trip, the first being to ascertain the feasibility of constructing a railway along the route, the second and more likely reason, simply that it had never been done before.

He was an enigmatic man, described as handsome, and possessed of a strong will. His travel books capture all of the excitement of travel in the hostile and little-charted territories that he chose to explore. They also paint interesting anthropological pictures of the peoples that he encountered, perhaps most famously his descriptions of the Tchukthis of the Siberian Arctic. His modest autobiography My Restless Life is a more sombre and pragmatic reflection of his life achievements. He died in a nursing home in Bournemouth in 1933 aged 77, predeceasing his much younger, third wife, the actress Elaine Inescourt.

A spot of indulgence today as I share a map which rather tickled my fancy, Nobel’s Explosives Company’s Map of the British Empire.

Bartholomew printed 7,350 copies of this map on the 19 October 1900. It is a standard Bartholomew map of the British Empire repurposed here as advertising for Nobel’s. Other entries have touched upon the use of maps for commercial purposes (Chas Baker & Co: the men and the map; Alexander Ferguson, confectioner to the Queen) but they seem tame compared to this dangerous commodity. Although the message that Nobel’s is trying to convey is one of pride in the universality of their product, to me, the map is slightly threatening, the areas highlighted in red look rather more like targets or conquests.

Alfred Nobel (1833-1896) was in fact Swedish but he helped to set up several businesses across Europe that manufactured and sold his most famous product, dynamite. Nobel’s Explosives Company Ltd was one such company. It began life in 1871 known at that time as the British Dynamite Co Ltd. The firm was set up by a group of Glaswegian businessmen who managed to raise the £24,000 (£1,660,000 today) necessary to go into business. Nobel himself was paid in shares, not only for his rights but also technical advice.

It was an extraordinarily successful company that went from strength to strength. In 1877 their estimated assets were worth £240,000 which would equate to £16,700,000 today. They became part of a multi-national trust company which drew together all of Nobel’s concerns, where they were by far the largest and they were contractors to the British Government by this time.

However, Alfred Nobel was made keenly aware of the negativity felt by some towards dynamite after reading his erroneously published obituary. In order to make recompense and to repair his reputation he founded the Nobel Prizes (physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and for work in peace) for which he is probably better remembered today, no doubt to his satisfaction.

As for the map, hidden beneath the surface there lies quite a lot of unexpected information, hinting at its former life. Canada lets us know which form of conveyance is best to use in different seasons,

and India reveals the main trade goods; both of debatable blowing things up usefulness.

All in all, small though it is, this map is a fascinating artefact both for what it shows and also for what it stands for.