The year is 1866 in Innerleithen. The railway line has just arrived, linking the small Borders town to Galashiels and Peebles and exploding its already reputable textiles trade.
It’s not just the mills drawing people to a place that not long before was a cluster of cottages marking the spot where the Leithen Water meets the River Tweed. Ever since Walter Scott published his 1823 novel about a fictional spa town in the Borders clearly based on Innerleithen, wealthy Scots have been flocking here to take the healing waters of St Ronan’s Wells. Innerleithen is on the map. This newspaper has just pronounced it a “boom” area.
Into this Victorian scene steps a local boot ’n’ book seller going by the Dickensian name of Robert Smail. Sniffing out a business opportunity among all that sulphur and wet wool, he opens a printing works on the high street and, next door, a shop where he sells his stationery and anything else that takes his fancy. Wedding china, fishing tackle, golf balls, ladies’ handbags, and a calendar given away every year in the local paper, both of which are typeset and printed in the adjoining workshop.
Fast-forward to 2016 and the mills are gone, the newspaper folded, and the railway line long closed. Innerleithen is now known more for the texture of its hardcore mountain biking tracks than its wool. Only one modest business has survived more than a century of major industrial change: Robert Smail’s Printing Works, still operating from its original Victorian premises on the high street and about to celebrate its 150th birthday. It is the only functioning printing works of its kind in Britain.
“Once upon a time it wouldn’t have been special,” says Gen Harrison, the property manager, compositor (responsible for manually setting the type) and letterpress obsessive who has worked here for twenty years. “Every small community in Scotland would have had its own jobbing printer. What’s unique about Smail’s is that it survived.”
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It very nearly didn’t. Run by three generations of the family, the printing works was bought by the National Trust for Scotland for £32,000 in 1986 after Cowan Smail, a confirmed bachelor, retired and put the business up for sale. By coincidence Maurice Rickards, the founder of the Ephemera Society, walked past while on holiday, noticed a “for sale” poster in an extinct typeface, and alerted the National Trust.
What he found was a living museum: a love letter to letterpress in fonts more than a century old and stuffed with the tools of a dying trade. Typefaces, printing blocks, presses, and 52 guard books containing a history of a community written in raffle tickets, posters, shipping records and wedding invitations.
To step inside is to step back in time. As Harrison puts it, “when I walk in here every morning I become Victorian”. The shop sells postcards, notebooks and calendars — all produced out the back — and contains the original glass-topped counter, wooden shelves and Victorian spirit. In the office, piled floor to ceiling with brown paper packages, ledgers, dockets and guard books (now numbering 55 as Harrison and her team add to its legacy), the vinegar tang of ink and musty paper hits you. Everything from the Victorian light switches to the paper holder disguised as a Fifties Bakelite frog is original. “The Smails were notorious hoarders,” says Rachel Mays, a senior assistant, who has been tasked with drawing up an inventory of every item, many of which will be shown as part of the 150th celebrations at an exhibition at St Ronan’s Wells.
We head upstairs to the case room where letterpress geeks presumably feel they’ve died and gone to typeface heaven. “Quite a few of our visitors are very passionate about apostrophes,” Harrison says. “You can imagine how they feel when they walk in here.” Case upon case of type, wooden and metal, old and really old. This is where the setting, inking, and proofing happens on the magnificent 1860 Columbian Eagle press, made in Edinburgh, then the printing capital of Europe.
The machine room has the kind of presses one would expect to find in the National Museum of Scotland rather than a Borders high street: a Heidelberg bought in 1953 for £400, and the hulking Wharfedale Reliance, which looks like part of a Victorian steam engine.
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“Even in our digital age there’s a real desire to know how all this was done before,” Harrison says. We leaf through the guard book from 1914, considerably shorter than the others because war had just started. “The type I use every day will have been used hundreds of thousands of times over the last 150 years,” she says, running ink-stained hands over adverts for war maps pasted into the book. “That’s what’s so extraordinary about Smail’s. It’s a living place.”