Messrs. Thomas Nelson and Sons employ some four hundred and fifty work-people in their establishment, about one-half of whom are young women.
The whole of Scotland is of course supplied from the head-quarters in Hope Park; but they have also large branches in London and New York. The former—situated in, or rather forming, Warwick Buildings, at the corner of Paternoster Row—is, though a branch, as large a bookselling warehouse as any in London, and in its interior arrangements is unrivalled. The basement storey is devoted to the stowage of wholesale stock and the execution of export and country orders, and over the shop there are four lofty floors.
The Scotch have during the century especially cultivated the trade of printing and bookselling. In the former branch alone, ten thousand persons are employed in Scotland, five thousand of whom are engaged in the capital. In 1860 there were in Edinburgh no less than thirty firms, who combine the united business of publishing and bookselling, besides ninety who confine themselves to bookselling alone. The eight or nine leading houses, with one exception, print themselves the books they sell; a practice which is almost indigenous to Edinburgh, or, at all events, does not obtain in London. The advantage of cheap labour, which includes, of course, cheap paper, are here so great, especially in the issue of large editions, as to more than counteract the drawback in the shape of transit cost to, and agents’ commission in, London. We have already entered into the history of several of these leading Edinburgh houses, and as our space is growing scanty, we can scarcely now do more than mention the firm of Oliver and Boyd; and though, from their long standing and importance, the career of the house would afford material for an interesting chapter, we must hope to have an opportunity of recurring to the subject at a not very distant time. Formerly Oliver and Boyd enjoyed a very large share of the Scotch country business, and occupied indeed much the same position in the northern, as is held by Simpkin, Marshall, and Co., in the southern, capital. Of later years, however, their attention has been more exclusively fixed upon the publication of educational works, and among the writers whose books have been issued by them, the names of Spalding, Reid, Morell, White, and McCulloch, are known to every schoolboy. “The Edinburgh Academy Class-Books” have also attained a very wide circulation far beyond the walls of the Edinburgh Academy; and “Oliver and Boyd’s Catechisms,” published at the low price of ninepence each, are used in nearly all elementary classes where science, in any form, is taught. As a book of reference for students of every grade, of a larger growth, Oliver and Boyd’s Edinburgh Almanac is, perhaps, unrivalled for the fulness and yet conciseness of every branch of official information, at all essential to the inhabitants of Scotland.
SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND CO.:
COLLECTING FOR THE COUNTRY TRADE.
We have, by this time, given historico-biographical notices of publishers and booksellers, representing very various phases of the “trade;” but we have still to show how, in the economy of publishing, and through an ingenious division of labour, the smaller booksellers in town, and all the booksellers in the country and the colonies, are kept constantly supplied with books and periodicals.
Before a new book is published, the work is taken round to the larger houses in the “Row,” and other parts of London, and “subscribed,” that is the first price to the trade, and the actual selling price to the public are quoted, and orders at the former price are given, according to the purchaser’s faith in the expected popularity of the work in question.
The wholesale houses, in their turn, supply all the country, colonial, and smaller London orders, reaping, of course, a due advantage from having the volumes demanded already stowed in their warehouses.