Inside the mapmaker's workshop: The Bartholomew Archive

In 1892, the Edinburgh Geological Society published a small but unusual map: the 'Earthquake map of Scotland'. Printed by John Bartholomew & Son, it recorded seismic activity across the country, a topic rarely mapped in scientific journals of the time. What makes this map remarkable is not just its subject, but its survival. It is preserved in the Bartholomew Printing Record, a unique archive that documents almost everything the firm printed between 1877 and 2002.

What is the Bartholomew Archive?

The Bartholomew Archive is one of the most extensive surviving records of a commercial map publisher. Unlike many collections that hold only finished maps, it preserves the full lifecycle of mapmaking: business records, reference maps, engraved plates, glass negatives, proofs, and the Printing Record itself. Together, these materials reveal how maps were researched, drawn, engraved, corrected, printed, and sold. Together making visible the skilled labour and decision-making behind every image.

The earthquake map above was printed for a scientific journal and is one of many items preserved in the Bartholemew Printing Record that are rarely catalogued elsewhere. The number of copies and date of printing, written at the top, show how Bartholomew tracked every job.

The making of a mapmaking firm

The Bartholomew story begins in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh, a city already known for its skilled engravers and printers. George Bartholomew (1784 to 1871) trained as an engraver with Daniel Lizars, one of the city's leading map and illustration engravers. After his apprenticeship, George initially worked on illustrations before turning his attention to maps. This shift would set his family on a path to becoming one of Britain's most respected cartographic names.

George's son, John Bartholomew (1805 to 1861), followed a similar route. He apprenticed with W.H. Lizars (Daniel's successor) and worked for several prominent Edinburgh publishers, including Adam and Charles Black, Blackwood, Collins, and W. & A.K. Johnston. In the 1830s, John set up his first commercial premises at 4 North Bridge, sharing space with Adam and Charles Black. This early phase of the business was typical of many Edinburgh printing workshops: small-scale, skilled, and closely tied to the city's wider publishing network.

From workshop to publishing house

The firm's transformation began under John's son, also called John (1831 to 1893). After training with his father, he spent two years in London working with the German geographer August Petermann, whose innovative approach to thematic mapping and colour printing would later influence Bartholomew's own work.

In 1870, John established new premises at 17 Brown Square (later Chambers Street), purchased steam-powered presses, and expanded from engraving into lithographic printing. This marked a decisive shift: the business was no longer just a workshop producing maps for others, but a growing enterprise with its own capacity for large-scale production.

The next generation, led by John George Bartholomew (1860 to 1920), brought even greater ambition. Described by contemporaries as energetic and visionary, John George oversaw the firm's transition from producing maps for other publishers to becoming a fully-fledged publishing house. In 1889, the business was incorporated as John Bartholomew & Co., and in 1919 it became John Bartholomew & Son Ltd. The firm moved first to shared premises with Thomas Nelson & Son on Park Road (1889), then to substantial, purpose-built premises on Duncan Street in 1911, a physical manifestation of its growing status.

Adapting through the generations

Most of the surviving Bartholomew Archive dates from John George's time, reflecting the firm's expansion and increasing complexity. Under his leadership, Bartholomew produced some of its most famous works, including the 'Citizen's Atlas of the World' (first published 1898) and the 'Times Survey Atlas of the World' (1920). The archive from this period charts the firm's evolution from a skilled local workshop into a nationally and internationally recognised publisher.

Successive generations of the Bartholomew family continued to adapt the business to changing technologies and markets. John George's son, John "Ian" Bartholomew (1890 to 1962), studied in Leipzig, Paris and Edinburgh, and consolidated many of his father's successes, including producing all the maps for the 'Times Atlas' series. His sons – John C. (1923 to 2008), Peter (1924 to 1987), and Robert (1927 to 2017) – managed the firm through its sale to Readers Digest (1980) and then to News International (1985). The Bartholomew family's formal association with the business ended in 1987, and the firm moved its operations to Bishopbriggs, near Glasgow, in 1995.

Through nearly two centuries, the Bartholomew firm maintained a reputation for quality and precision. The archive preserves the records of this continuity: business papers, printing records, and correspondence that show how a family firm navigated technological change, market competition, and shifting audiences while remaining rooted in Edinburgh's print culture.

The workshop behind the map

Look closely at a finished Bartholomew map and you will see a seamless image: crisp lettering, precise borders, carefully graded colours. Behind that polished surface lay a complex, multi-stage process involving many different specialists. The Bartholomew Archive makes this invisible work visible. It preserves the plates, proofs, drafts, and business records that show how maps moved from raw information to printed products. They passed through many hands, each with their own skilled contribution.

Copper-plate engraving was among the most exacting of these roles. Engravers like David Webster, who retired in 1975 as the firm's last copper-plate engraver, underwent seven-year apprenticeships to master the craft. They had to carve lettering, symbols and contours directly onto copper plates using fine tools that demanded steady hands and intense concentration. As if that was not impressive enough, they did this in mirror image so that, when printed, the text would read the correct way around. The archive preserves around 3,000 engraved copper, steel and zinc plates, each one a record of this painstaking labour.

Once engraved, plates were used to create proofs: trial prints that allowed editors and engravers to check accuracy and make corrections. The archive holds approximately 20,000 printed maps and proof sheets, many annotated with handwritten notes, corrections, and instructions.

The skill of colourists, which typically required a five-year apprenticeship, then added another layer of key information to the maps. Working from engraved plates, they prepared separate 'printing pulls' for each colour: greens for low ground, browns for higher elevations, and blues for water. This required careful planning. Each colour layer had to align precisely with the others, or the final map would appear blurred or 'misregistered'. The archive's glass plate collection (around 6,000 negatives from the 1920s to 1950s) documents this stage of production. They demonstrate how photographic techniques were integrated into the firm's workflow as technology evolved.

The Printing Record: An archive within an archive

The Bartholomew Printing Record itself is one of the archive's most distinctive features. It comprises bound volumes, boxes, and map drawers containing a copy of almost everything printed by the firm between 1877 and 2002. It includes not only maps published under the Bartholomew name, but also items printed for other publishers, scientific societies, and government bodies.

The 'Earthquake map of Scotland' (1892) is a typical example. This small, specialised map was printed for the Edinburgh Geological Society and might easily have been lost to history without the Printing Record's systematic preservation. Handwritten notes on many items record the number of copies printed and the date. This is a handy reminder that every map was a commercial job, tracked and costed like any other product.

Reference maps in the archive show another side of the process, the research and compilation stage. Before a new map could be drawn, Bartholomew staff gathered source material from Ordnance Survey maps, geological surveys, travel accounts, and correspondence with experts. These reference copies – often annotated with notes, highlights, and cross-references – reveal how geographic knowledge was assembled, interpreted and transformed into a new map. They show that maps were not neutral representations of the world, but carefully constructed objects shaped by available information, editorial judgement and commercial priorities.

Together, these plates, proofs, reference maps, glass negatives, and the Printing Record allow researchers to reconstruct the full lifecycle of individual maps. You can trace a map from its source material through editorial decisions, engraving, colour separation, printing, and final publication. The archive makes it possible to see not just what a map looks like, but how it came to look that way through the craft, collaboration, and countless small decisions that shaped the final image.

Crowdsourcing the landscape

Once a map was produced, how did Bartholomew subsequently keep them up to date? Interestingly, they did not employ surveyors. Instead, the firm relied on a network of external contributors. Individuals, institutions, and societies supplied the information needed to keep maps accurate and current. This collaborative approach is one of the most striking features of the archive: it reveals how geographic knowledge was crowdsourced long before the internet made such practices commonplace.

This external input was not just supplementary, it was essential. Without it, Bartholomew's maps would have quickly become outdated in a landscape that was constantly changing: new roads built, railways extended, place names altered, boundaries redrawn. The 'revision sheets' in the archive are annotated with corrections, queries, and instructions, and illustrate how this information was integrated into the firm's workflow.

A typical sheet might carry notes from multiple sources: a geological survey's update on coastal erosion, a local authority's notification of boundary changes, or a Cyclists' Touring Club (CTC) member's report on a new bypass (more on that shortly!). Editors would collate these inputs, decide which to incorporate, and pass instructions to engravers and colourists for the next printing run.

The crowdsourcing model had limits, of course. Not all information was reliable, and editors had to exercise judgement about what to include. But the archive shows that Bartholomew treated this as a strength, not a weakness. By drawing on diverse sources, from amateur cyclists to professional scientists, the firm could claim a breadth and currency of information that competitors might struggle to match. It was a model that combined commercial pragmatism with intellectual rigour, and it helped sustain the firm's reputation for quality over nearly two centuries.

The Cyclists who helped make the maps

As teased above, one of Bartholomew's most important partners was the Cyclists' Touring Club (CTC). From the 1890s, the firm enjoyed a long collaboration with the CTC, whose members received discounts on Bartholomew's popular half-inch maps in return for supplying corrections and updates.

In the 1890s alone, the CTC had over 60,000 members. These were avid cyclists who regularly toured the countryside and returned detailed reports on road conditions, new routes, and changes to the landscape. For Bartholomew, this was a cost-effective way to maintain accuracy across large areas without maintaining a team of surveyors. Surviving correspondence in the archive illustrates the depth of this exchange. Letters from CTC members, like Bernard Hale's 1913 report on road quality, provided granular, on-the-ground information that would have been difficult for the firm to gather independently.

Similar letters arrived from geologists, oceanographers, scientists and explorers. Learned societies such as the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Scottish Geographical Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and the International Cartographic Association also got involved. The archive preserves detailed exchanges between Bartholomew and these bodies, showing how the firm positioned itself within wider networks of geographic expertise.

The CTC collaboration also reveals something about Bartholomew's audience strategy. By offering discounts to CTC members, the firm cultivated a loyal customer base among the growing number of leisure cyclists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This was part of a broader shift. As outdoor recreation became more popular, Bartholomew adapted its products to serve new markets (such as walkers, motorists, tourists) while maintaining its reputation for accuracy and reliability. The archive's business records show how these audiences were identified, targeted, and served through tailored products and marketing.

The commerce of quality cartography

Maps are often seen as cultural objects. They can be tools for navigation, works of art, or statements of national identity. But at Bartholomew, every map was also a commercial product: commissioned, costed, printed, and sold according to the same principles that governed any other business. The archive's business records make this explicit. They show how geographic knowledge was transformed into a commodity, tracked through every stage of production and sale.

The Order and Cost Books are among the most detailed records of this process. Each entry records the full lifecycle of a job. This included the customer's name and address, the title or description of the work, the number of copies required, and itemised charges for drawing, engraving, lithographic work on stones, tinting, transparency, printing, inks, paper, and total cost.

A single page might list dozens of jobs – maps for other publishers, scientific societies, government bodies, and Bartholomew's own publications – each one costed to the penny. These books reveal not just what was printed, but how much it cost to produce, who paid for it, and what profit margin the firm expected.

This level of detail is unusual. Many publishing archives survive only in fragmentary form, such as a few ledgers, some correspondence, scattered proofs. The Bartholomew Archive, by contrast, preserves a near-continuous record of the firm's commercial activity from the 1880s to the 1990s. This allows researchers to trace changes in the economics of map production over time. How costs shifted as new technologies were adopted, how pricing strategies evolved, and how the firm adapted to changing markets.

The archive shows that Bartholomew was not static in its approach. As technologies changed from copper-plate engraving to lithography, or from hand-colouring to photographic processes, the firm adapted its methods and cost structures accordingly.

Order and Cost Books from the early twentieth century show increasing use of photographic techniques, for example, with charges for "transparency" and "photo-lithography" appearing alongside traditional engraving fees. Later records document the shift to offset printing and other modern techniques. Through all these changes, the firm maintained a commercial asset that had been built over generations and was carefully protected: its reputation for quality.

'The Citizen's Atlas of the World' (1898), the 'Times Survey Atlas of the World' (1920), and the 'Survey Atlas of Scotland' (1912) were all high-profile publications that carried the Bartholomew name and reinforced its association with quality and authority.

Building a trusted name

Over time, the firm's marketing also had to evolve. By the 1930s, competition in the map market had intensified, and Bartholomew responded with increasingly sophisticated advertising. Advertisements from this period (preserved in the archive's business records) target specific audiences: motorists, cyclists, tourists, schools.

Many promote Bartholomew's Scottish roots, using distinctive Highland landscapes to create a sense of place and trust. The slogan "Bartholomew's Maps will keep you right" appears repeatedly. Again, a promise of accuracy and reliability that spoke directly to the anxieties of travellers navigating unfamiliar terrain.

This commercial agility is one of the key reasons the firm survived for so long. They were able to adapt methods, markets, and messaging while maintaining a consistent brand identity. The archive documents this process in unusual depth, not just the finished products, but the decisions, calculations, and strategies that shaped them. It shows how a specialist firm navigated technological change, market competition, and shifting audiences over nearly two centuries, preserving its identity while modernising its methods.

For historians of publishing and business, this is invaluable. The Bartholomew Archive offers evidence of how an established firm sustained itself over time through branding, product development, market positioning, and reputation management. It shows that maps were not just cultural artefacts, but commercial products embedded in wider economic networks. And it reveals how a family firm rooted in Edinburgh participated in national and global markets, linking local expertise to international demand.

Why the Bartholomew Archive matters

Maps are often treated as finished facts: authoritative, neutral representations of the world. But the Bartholomew Archive tells a different story. It shows maps as products of work shaped by skilled labour, editorial judgement, commercial priorities, and collaborative networks. It reveals the people, processes and institutions behind the image. And it demonstrates that geographic knowledge was made, not just found.

This is the archive's lasting importance. It preserves not just the polished outcomes (the finished maps that circulated widely and shaped public understanding) but the workshop behind them. The copper plates record the material labour of engraving. The proofs show annotations, corrections and iterations. The reference maps reveal the sources used to compile new work. The business papers describe the organisational structures that sustained the firm. The Printing Record documents almost everything the firm printed, including items that would otherwise have been lost to history. Together, these materials make visible the invisible work of production.

The archive's significance extends beyond cartography. For historians of labour, it offers evidence of the roles, skills, and organisation of work within a printing and publishing firm. From seven-year engraving apprenticeships to five-year colourist training, and from crowdsourced surveying to in-house editorial decision-making.

For historians of publishing, it provides a rare case study of how an established firm sustained itself over time through branding, product development and reputation management. For historians of knowledge, it shows how geographic information was created, interpreted and communicated, and how authority was established and maintained.

The archive also matters for what it reveals about place. The Bartholomew story is an Edinburgh one, rooted in the city's long-standing publishing and printing industries, where skills, labour, and knowledge were closely interconnected. The firm's development was facilitated by the urban concentration of trades like printers, engravers, editors, booksellers, and related specialists. They all formed part of the same cultural and commercial landscape. The archive preserves detailed records of the firm's premises over time – plans, photographs, valuations – showing how the business grew and adapted within the city.

At the same time, the firm's reach extended far beyond Edinburgh. Bartholomew maps circulated widely in schools, homes, offices, and institutions across Britain and beyond. They shaped how people understood Scotland, Britain and the wider world. The archive therefore links the local and the global. It shows how a business rooted in one city participated in the making of national and international geographic knowledge. And it reveals how trust (built on Edinburgh's reputation as a centre for printing and publishing) became a commercial asset that helped the firm compete in wider markets.

The relevance of the Bartholomew Archive today

Today, the archive speaks to questions that are still urgent. How is information produced? How is authority built? How do visual media shape public understanding? In an age of digital maps, algorithmic recommendations and user-generated content, the Bartholomew Archive offers a historical perspective on these issues.

The archive shows that maps have always been constructed, shaped by available information, editorial choices, and commercial imperatives. It reminds us that behind every map, there are people making decisions, exercising judgement, and negotiating trade-offs.

It also speaks to the value of preserving working records, not simply finished products. Without plates, proofs, drafts and business papers, we would know far less about how maps came to look the way they do. We would see the image, but not the process. We would understand the outcome, but not the labour, collaboration, and decision-making that produced it. The Bartholomew Archive preserves that process. It lets us see the craft, the business, and the judgement that turned data and design into printed authority.

For anyone interested in maps, Scottish innovation or the history of publishing, the archive rewards close attention and careful exploration. It is a resource that supports diverse enquiries. From the technical details of engraving and colour separation to the broader questions of how geographic knowledge was produced and circulated. And it is a reminder that archives matter: not just as repositories of the past, but as tools for understanding how the present came to be.