When Mercat Press and Birlinn Ltd joined forces last year it marked the end of a glorious 40-year publishing adventure. Mercat Managing Director Tom Johnstone looks back at the highs and lows of this small publishing house, from its humble beginnings to its new-found home as the outdoors imprint for Birlinn.
The merger presented us with an interesting logistical problem. Both publishers have published mainly Scottish books, and over the years have published books in the same subject areas and sometimes even by the same authors!
With such a lot of overlap it makes sense to merge the lists together. Thus, when this year we relaunch Mercat author Jess Smith’s autobiographical trilogy, Jessie’s Journey, it will come out under the Birlinn imprint. Similarly, the new book from Mercat crime writer Gillian Galbraith, Where the Shadow Falls, will be published by Polygon, Birlinn’s fiction arm, as will the new edition of her first Alice Rice mystery, Blood in the Water.
The Mercat name is, however, being retained for outdoor books like The West Highland Way Official Guide and the popular 25 Walks series. Outdoor books on walking and cycling have been very successful for Mercat in the past, something we want to build on, since Birlinn up to now have not been strongly represented in this area.
There is another more powerful reason for keeping the Mercat name alive. It is because it preserves a link with publishing and bookselling in Scotland that stretches back to the middle of the nineteenth century.
Mercat Press was founded about 40 years ago by Ainslie and Jimmy Thin of the James Thin bookselling chain. Since the earliest times, bookshops have been involved in publishing as well as selling books. It is only in the modern era that the two activities have become separate industries. Books with the imprint of ‘James Thin Bookseller’ can be found dating back to the 1850s. Ainslie and Jimmy Thin hit on the happy idea of reviving this old tradition of their firm, and called their imprint Mercat [Market] Press in honour of its roots in the book trade.
For some time the Mercat publishing programme was restricted to new facsimile editions of classic Scottish works, such as the sumptuous five-volume Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland by MacGibbon and Ross. From the 1990s onward, however, the list rapidly expanded with newly commissioned titles, including such modern classics as Tess Darwin’s The Scots Herbal (soon to come out in a new Birlinn edition) and the spectacular photography of Andy Hall’s Sense of Belonging series. New editions of classic books like Rowena Farre’s Seal Morning and Chiang Yee’s equally delightful The Silent Traveller in Edinburgh were also a staple of the Mercat list.
When the James Thin bookshops were sold in 2002, and Mercat Press Ltd became a separate entity after a management buyout, the backlist contained some 300 titles. Five years of dynamic publishing followed, which saw among other things the creation of Crescent Fiction, a list which premiered Paul Reed’s incendiary The One and William Sutton’s Victorian romp, The Worms of Euston Square.
So when Mercat became part of Birlinn Ltd in 2007, it brought a lot of history with it—a link to one of Scotland’s oldest bookselling dynasties, and to the days when a bookseller wouldn’t just sell you a book, he would publish it for you too! Who is to say that these days might not return in the future? We feel it is only right, then, that the Mercat name should live on, as a reminder of how publishing and bookselling constantly renew and reinvent themselves, leading-edge industries built strongly on the foundations of the past.
Forthcoming outdoor books from Mercat:
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