Award-winning Scottish publishing and design
The revival of my eighteenth-century balloon-o-mania was inspired after some recent walks around Clachan of Camspie and Milton of Campsie (just north and east of where we live) during which I discovered that that balloonist, Vincent Lunardi, landed in Campsie Glen at the conclusion of his second flight from Glasgow in November 1785. After wowing…
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I’ve been reading a lot of books while researching People Make Glasgow, and one of my favourite recent reads is Ian R Mitchell’s This City Now (reissued as Walking through Glasgow’s Industrial Past in 2015) which offers a brilliant walker’s guide to the city’s industrial history. The book mentions one of Mitchell’s peripatetic-literary Glasgow forbears…
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Hello! Our internet is very wonky at the moment, because our broadband is being “upgraded”. As we live in a rural area where connectivity has never been that great, the prospect of speedy wifi is really quite exciting . . . the only downside is a few days of slow internet, and some difficulty transferring…
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Today I’m sharing the first of series of images and recollections from the Applied Arts Scotland residency I was part of last September – which seems, for so many reasons, like a very long time ago. This residency was part of the British Council’s Crafting Futures programme, bringing makers from Scotland and Mexico together, to…
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Good morning! A poem today. Earlier this week saw the 250th anniversary of the birth of William Wordsworth – a poet who has, for the past couple of centuries, often set the ideological terms of the writing of landscape and nature. I’ve been thinking about Wordsworth’s particular “Romantic” landscapes quite a lot in recent months,…
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After we published my oatcake-inspired cardigan, Land o’ Cakes the other day, Tom reminded me of his favourite oatcake recipe that he’d included in our Buachaille book some years ago. This is a great recipe for whipping up a quick bread-replacing staple (and as long as the mill producing your oatmeal doesn’t also make wheat…
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“the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean’s skin” Herman Melville, Moby Dick Hello everyone, it’s Tom here. In today’s post I’m excited to tell you more about my latest body of work, which also comprises my first solo exhibition – Light by the Sea. (Otter Ferry) Like…
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We are about to take our short festive break, and have all been looking back over the past 12 months. 2019 has certainly been a very significant year for us as a publisher. With our Glasgow printers, Bell & Bain, we’ve completed work on four new titles, and printed around 18,000 books (the largest number…
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In the spring of 2018, after a hard winter in which I’d been struggling with my depression, I spent some time in Berneray and North Uist. You can get a sense of how much I immediately loved the place, and how very much I enjoyed meeting Meg Rodger and learning more about her work –…
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Hello! Tom here. Kate and I spent all of last week away in Berneray and North Uist, where I’ve been working on a new photographic project (more of which later). Late spring and early summer is a truly beautiful time of year in the Outer Hebrides, and we feel very lucky to be able to…
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Have you heard about the Shetland MRI scanner appeal? I know from personal experience just how important MRI scans are, since it was inside one of these machines that my stroke was diagnosed nine years ago. Magnetic resonance imaging is an incredibly important diagnostic tool not just for brain injuries, like my stroke, but for…
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Hello everyone, it’s Tom here. I thought I’d pop in to share some of my photos from our recent Hebridean trip to the isle of Berneray (Eilean Bhearnaraigh). As a photographer, I find the ever-changing weather and shifting quality of light in Scotland’s Western Isles really stimulating in my work. On this trip we were…
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