Job done… for now! This was my last full day in Edinburgh, and I will travel back home tomorrow. Before arriving early afternoon at the apartment where I have been staying for the week, I went for dinner in the Indian restaurant I visited two evenings ago. Again the food was delicious. Again I chose a two-platter course and a lassie to celebrate the week’s work.
Today I camped all day in the National Library of Scotland, starting in the reading room, leafing through the 1945 to 1949 copies of Scottish Field magazine. During my visit last year, I discovered Thomson’s photographs were published in the monthly magazine in the early 1950s, so I wanted to check earlier editions. Tagging the photographer’s name to a picture is nearly impossible because none of the photographs, except a few, are credited. Even the content doesn’t mention any photographer; only the writers are named. Was this the common rule back in these days? Scottish Field was a reasonably high-end magazine 70 years ago – it still exists – and started printing photographs in colour at the end of the 1940s, which were still painting-like. Probably none, perhaps a few of the landscape photographs – black and white and colour – were taken by Thomson. In my continuing search and discovery of Thomson’s photos in other publications, I have to compare many of the landscape photographs published in Scottish Field with those I know are Thomson’s. Last year I researched volumes printed from 1950 to 1956, and many were Thomson colour photographs, also used for the yearly Scots Pictorial Calendar. At the end of the day, I looked at Scottish Field of 1957 and 1958, which also contain some colour landscape photographs. Also, these can’t be labelled “Thomson”.
The big picture is that a range of W.S. Thomson’s colour landscape photographs he took at the end of the 1940s and early 1950s he sold to The Munro Press publisher of Scottish Field and the Scots Pictorial Calendar. They also appeared in Thomson’s pictorial books The Highlands in Colour and Colourful Scotland, published by Oliver and Boyd, and as postcards, published by different postcard companies.
The afternoon was dedicated to finishing the last documents on the Special Reading Room shelf. Mainly I browsed through a large folder of the mountaineer J.H.B. Bell, who wrote the book A Progress in Mountaineering, which was published in 1950. Dr Bell, who was trained as an industrial chemist, worked for a paper factory and was also the editor for the Scottish Mountaineering Club from 1936 to 1959. Today I finished the 1949 correspondence, and most of that year, the author and the publisher were dealing with finding and selecting the proper photographic illustrations. In my follow-up research, I have to look at the 1948 file because that year (even in 1947), Bell got in touch with Oliver and Boyd. Bell sent the manuscript to the publisher at the end of 1948. Conclusion: it took two years from a finished manuscript to the book’s publishing.
Time to go to bed with a more noisy backdrop as usual. Edinburgh City is ready for a bustling weekend and people laughing and loud chatting. Tomorrow back home to do the laundry and prepare for a trip south on Monday…
#travelintime #wsthomson #Edinburgh #NationalLibraryofScotland