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News

January 2010

14 January 2010 saw the successful launch at Edinburgh Napier University of Edinburgh City of Print, a multimedia website offering a wealth of print and publishing related material held in the collections of the City of Edinburgh Museums. A SAPPHIRE project funded by the AHRC and Museum Galleries Scotland, Edinburgh City of Print gives visitors the opportunity to view previously unseen items from these collections, to understand the history of these key industries that shaped Edinburgh, and to discover the working lives behind them. Photos of the launch can be seen here.

October 2009

To mark the year of Homecoming Scotland, SAPPHIRE, in conjunction with Publishing Scotland have created the exhibition 'Scotland Ink: 10 Scottish Books that Changed the World'. The exhibition runs from 1-31 October 2009 at Eden Court Theatre in Inverness (to coincide with the UHI Millennium Institute conference Scotland’s Global Impact – how one small nation changed the world from 22-24 October 2009). For further details, and a list of the top ten books chosen, see Scotland Ink site.

News archive

Welcome to SAPPHIRE

The Scottish Archive of Print and Publishing History Records (SAPPHIRE) aims to record the social, economic and cultural history of the Scottish Printing and Publishing industries in the Twentieth Century and document the working lives of people who have been employed in the industry and have witnessed the changes that have taken place within it.

As a major employer in twentieth century Scottish industry, whose importance has been widely acknowledged, the print and publishing industry has a social, economic and cultural history which has been little researched and documented. The SAPPHIRE initiative has been set up as the first sustained attempt to fill this gap within that knowledge of the industry.