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Dear All,
 
I have been meaning to write this up for some time as it is probably
of some historic interest to all of you interested in cartography.
Please feel free to forward this to anyone else who might be interested,
or to use it in e.g. BCS newsletter.
 
Summarising from an article in the Edinburgh Evening News of 10 Oct 1995:
 
Map Firm Charts New Course
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The company that put Edinburgh on the map are moving to Glasgow after
almost 170 years in the Capital. World famous mapmakers Bartholomew are
moving because of cost-cutting by parent company HarperCollins, a division
of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.
 
Cartographic Director Alex Elder said: "It is a radical move and will be
quite sad but the new premises are much more suitable for what we are
doing."
 
The Bartholomew archives, though, are to stay in Edinburgh and have been
handed over to the National Library of Scotland, located just around the
corner from the Bartholomew building. Head Librarian Margaret Wilkes
said: "This is probably the largest map archive in the world and we are
pleased that it has been saved for the nation rather than being split up
amongst private collectors."
 
Many Bartholomew maps will continue to be printed in Edinburgh by the
Edinburgh Press Ltd (formerly part of Bartholomew but the subject of
a management buy out two years ago).
 
End of article summary.
 
Further to the above a party was held at Duncan Street on October 12
to mark the last day. Guest of Honour was John Bartholomew whose family
owned the company until selling to the Reader's Digest in 1980.
 
For those interested the Bartholomew archive at the National Library
now comprises one of the most complete records of a private company
in a Library collection in the UK. Material goes right back to the
origin of the company and includes around 4000 copper and steel
engraved plates (not just of maps, but including eg old master
reproductions, Atlantic liner cabin plans, and so on), the collection
of historic atlases and sheet maps (used as source material over the
years), the company accounts (invoices, account books, bills, etc), the
correspondence of the company including letters written to and by the
various Bartholomews (such as letters from Polar Explorers with details
of their geographic discoveries), company sample books (beautifull large
format leather volumes with samples of maps and printing work), a virtually
complete set of everything ever produced by the company and so
forth. In fact the family apparently almost never threw anything out!
I understand that the National Library intend to use the material for
a pioneering cataloguing and indexing system trial which should allow
for researchers to access material by keyword searches and so on
rather than be limited to the conventional author/title method.
 
Thats all for the moment,
 
Dr Tim Rideout
Bartholomew - HarperCollins Cartographic,
Westerhill Road,
Bishopbriggs,
Glasgow,
Scotland, Europe.
 
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