Archie Turnbull

Publisher for 34 years at the Edinburgh University Press

Archie Rule Turnbull, publisher: born Aberdeen 7 July 1923; Secretary, Edinburgh University Press 1953-87; FRSE 1981; married 1955 Penny Williams (one daughter); died Edinburgh 8 February 2003.

The middle half of the last century was a golden age in the annals of book production in Britain – its paper, printing and binding were the best in the world. The great university presses at Oxford and Cambridge produced some of the handsomest books, and their style was the standard by which others measured themselves. All that changed in the late 1960s and 1970s when letterpress printing disappeared and the "Petrol War" killed the British paper industry.

One university press refused to give way, and maintained the standard that others abandoned. It was the Edinburgh University Press, under the direction, from 1953 to 1987, of Archie Turnbull.

He came to what was to be his life's work quite young. Born in Aberdeen in 1923, he went to school in Edinburgh at George Watson's College, and thence on to the university in 1940. War then interrupted, and he served for over four years, mostly in Italy, with the Cameron Highlanders and the Lovat Scouts. In 1948 he graduated with a first class degree in English. He then joined the Edinburgh publishers W. & R. Chambers, where he edited books and read proofs of Chambers's English Dictionary. The offer from the university came in 1953, and he took it.

He liked to pretend that he was successor to George Anderson, appointed "Printer to the College" in 1637, but the ensuing three centuries were blank. It was to a still embryonic enterprise that he was appointed "Secretary" in 1953. At the outset there were no other employees, apart from a part-time secretary, but he was never short of courage, even obstinacy, both needed in the creation of a publishing business within an already ancient university. By the time that he retired in 1987 he had a staff of more than a dozen, and all but 500 titles stood to the credit of the press.

He had a very proper and catholic view of the sort of subjects that the press should publish, from prehistory (such as The Chambered Tombs of Scotland, 1963) to the latest research on machine intelligence. Poetry was always important, from studies on Petrarch and Racine to anthologies of contemporary Scottish verse and collections by George Bruce and Edwin Morgan. The classics of Scottish letters and scholarship were not neglected, from a pioneering monograph, The Library of Drummond of Hawthornden (1971), to Stair's famous legal text The Institutions of the Law of Scotland (1981), first published by Anderson's widow in 1681. But Turnbull also saw into the future. He was wise enough to publish important work on Islam and China.

The idea of a "best-seller" never crossed his mind, but in 1966 he was delighted to be surprised when one arrived in the shape of A.J. Youngson's The Making of Classical Edinburgh, and more so when his original judgement was vindicated and it achieved classic status.

In all this he enjoyed sympathetic support from the Press Committee to whom he was answerable. The function of the press as then seen was to publish important works of scholarship that would otherwise not appear in print. One of the members of the committee summed up his task as "losing money intelligently".

As a publisher, Turnbull could skim through a typescript in almost any field with a lawyer's speed to arrive quickly at what he saw as weaknesses in structure or argument or even detail. He was no respecter of authority unbacked by solid merit. He was bored by the minutiae of editing and left it to his editors.

The design of books was another matter. He took a keen and informed interest in it, but early on spotted the talent of George Mackie, then just out of art school and looking for a job. He became the Edinburgh University Press's "Official Designer", an appointment that inaugurated a singularly creative partnership that lasted for 34 years. Turnbull and Mackie were well served locally. In Edinburgh itself there were R. & R. Clark, Neill's and Constable's, all first-rate printers, as were Maclehose in Glasgow; Hunter & Foulis were excellent bookbinders, and there was a wealth of good paper-mills, Carrongrove, Tullis Russell and many others. With these, "Monotype" composition and letterpress printing delivered a quality still unequalled.

Choosing which type to set a book in, the margins and decoration, was a task in which publisher and designer educated each other, to great effect. Every book, whether ancient or modern in theme, needed and got an appropriate type and layout. Together, they studied the monuments of fine printing in the past, and applied them to the future. Heuristic Programming and Stair's Institutions got the same care. One thing was certain: the end-product would have its own homogeneity, a rightness the more sure because it was not intrusive.

Book-jackets were studied and designed with the same care, argument and delight. Mackie would be given a host of ideas, from which a rough design would emerge, to be propped up on Turnbull's desk, to be seen, apostrophised, and further studied, sometimes for days. Authors were, mercifully, not consulted. Professor Stuart Piggott, long time Convenor of the Press Committee and a great supporter of Turnbull, thought the only use of jackets was to establish which books on his shelves he had not yet read – those still had their jackets on.

The Edinburgh University Press came to be recognised far outside its native city. It joined the American Association of University Presses in 1967 and Edinburgh books thenceforth took a disproportionately large share of its annual 50 Best Books Show. When Turnbull retired in 1987 he received the association's Distinguished Director's Medal.

These halcyon days did not last. Letterpress printing and Monotype composition, so long the bastion of good printing, vanished in the 1970s, and Turnbull, appalled by the poor quality of photo-composition and lithography, paper and binding, nevertheless maintained a relentless battle to maintain standards. His red face grew more fiery, the slightly bulging blue eyes bent ever fiercer on defaulting suppliers. But he never gave up, and his later books bore signs of the greater care he had to bestow on them, of quality achieved against the odds.

When he retired, the university properly rewarded him with an honorary LLD. The Portsburgh Press has just published a catalogue raisonné of the Edinburgh University Press publications during his 34 years. George Mackie's tribute was:

Design is not speculative work. No graphic designer is better than the quality of his client. No client could have been more enthusiastically supportive and discerning than Archie Turnbull, nor more intellectually stimulating.

To his authors, to all he met, he was the same.

Nicolas Barker

"I picked up a bottle of Brunello at Milan airport – it's the best that Italy has to offer, and if you promise to come up here around the end of September I'll keep it for you – as well as the malt, of course." Thus Archie Turnbull, a friend for 30 years, beginning a letter in 1998, writes Frank Collieson.

I worked in Heffers bookshop in Cambridge, where he claimed to find "real" booksellers capable of recognising the high standards of editing, design and production he fiercely embraced and encouraged in others. He approved of our style of promoting books and responded with eager participation in launch parties and exhibitions.

He keenly enjoyed hospitality, whether as guest or host. At their lovely, lived-in house at the edge of the New Town he and Penny kept the warmest of Edinburgh welcomes. Archie was a superb cook: shopping for supper with him was a pleasure of anticipation. And later, when the malt was poured in Lucullan measure, he would sometimes produce the visitors' book begun years before, to relive countless evenings as an "entertaining" publisher – a role he saw as central to his work: friends, authors, artists filled the pages, while their host's meticulous side-notes recorded what was eaten and drunk.

One was educated by Archie's enthusiasms and initiated into enduring friendships with fellow perfectionists – such as George Mackie, who designed the Edinburgh books, and Harry McIntosh who set the type for them. Through these associations could be learnt, say, the difference between "soft" and "hard" end-of-line hyphens (you quote the hard ones): an arcane distinction revealed by his labours in retirement as secretary to the ongoing Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels. Archie revered Scott, thought less of Stevenson, but owned several first editions, bought cheap and proudly shown from the straining shelves in the dining-room (while Penny would stoutly aver that she found Stevenson much easier to read than Scott).

My last meeting with Archie was in November, the night before the annual RLS Club lunch in Edinburgh. He came to the front door as he always did, but was distressingly frail and much reduced. I prefer to remember him as the punchy publisher in full self-assured flight: as when, just off the train, he bustled into the bookshop bearing a noble six-pack of Highland Park and a bag of appropriate cheese and oatcakes to celebrate publication of Colin Renfrew's The Prehistory of Orkney; or that hot evening in Bedford Square after a publisher's party when, gorgeous in his Fraser kilt, he caught every eye – except that of the taxi-driver he needed to get him to the sleeper, to the Waverley station, and to the office in George Square in the morning.