As a child in the early 90s my dad used to take me on his expeditions to rescue treasures from skips. There we sometimes found books, with dark covers and creamy pages and letters that looked stamped into the thick paper. They were byproducts of the renovation of unfashionable 20th century Glaswegian West End tenements. Years later, with two friends, I now run radical history walking tours of Glasgow.
As the walking tours grew in popularity, I thought again of those expeditions. I started developing a collection of books, pamphlets and ephemera, to hand round at relevant stops. Holding a pamphlet from the 1940s, feeling the same thin paper under your fingers that Glaswegians of eighty years before would have felt, connects you in an embodied way with those readers. Hearing lines from a legendary speech while standing in the spot where that speech was first delivered is a unique experience. The publications transport you to the struggles of decades past, from tenant organising and shipyard work-ins to Red Clydeside, the name given to the great wave of radicalism which swept the west of Scotland in the first decades of the 20th century.
Willie Gallacher’s Revolt on the Clyde contains some particularly vivid descriptions of the Red Clydeside era. He mentions an elderly stalwart of the labour movement, Mrs Reid, who lived on the top floor of a now demolished tenement opposite a concert venue. When Prime Minister Lloyd George visited the city in 1916 he was greeted by Mrs Reid hanging out of her window, ‘her white hair crowning a face alight with the flame of revolt against the mad slaughter of the war… waving a giant red flag’.
Later in the book Gallacher describes the Battle of George Square in 1919, the legendary demonstration turned riot which was part of the campaign for a 40-hour working week. On tours stopping in George Square we often read out Gallacher’s account: ‘Marching with us from St Andrew’s Hall was our old friend Mrs Reid, with her huge Red Flag. While we were speaking in the square, the flag was passed from hand to hand and then went flying aloft and gaily spread its scarlet folds from the municipal flag-pole.’
Participants then get a look at the book itself, with the passage marked. They can see the series the book was part of, A Workers’ Library by Lawrence and Wishart, which produced affordable books for working-class readers on history, science and literature. Not only that; participants can admire the simple cover design, the grainy feel of the material, perhaps read a wee bit of the Lenin text on proletarian culture printed on the endpapers.
The books and pamphlets which we hand around on the tours represent the main printers of left-wing political literature in Glasgow across the first half of the 20th century. There is a rich history of radical printing in the city, which has had a printing trade since 1638. By the early 20th century Glasgow was packed with radical printers, fervent believers that printing literature was the first step to revolution. The Socialist Labour Press on Renfrew St was said to be the most important distributor of Marxist literature in Great Britain, and was considered such a threat to public order it was briefly shut down without warning in August 1917 under the Defence of the Realm act.
Among Glasgow’s radical printshops was Civic Press, who printed The Scottish Worker, a newspaper published daily during the 1926 General Strike, and the writings of Constance Markiewicz from their printworks beside the Forth and Clyde Canal where it skirts the centre of the city. The building is still there, having been retrofitted in 2021, with its big windows harking back to a time where light was crucial for typesetting.
One of my favourite publishers is Strickland Press, which was run by Glasgow anarchists Guy Aldred, Jenny Patrick, Ethel MacDonald and JT Caldwell out of a grimy and now-demolished tenement in the city centre. Strickland Press is significant for the trailblazing women printers who ran it. Both Ethel MacDonald and Jenny Patrick travelled to Spain during the 1930s to work with the anarchists there and report back to Scotland, and for decades the tenement in John Street echoed to the sound of the ‘ancient foot-treadled printing press… [which] made a great rumble as it inked, and a thunderous clap as the platen met the typeface’.
Strickland Press printed a socialist newspaper called The Word, alongside leaflets, posters and pamphlets on birth control, anarchism and anticolonial struggles. The pamphlet in my collection, ‘Rex v. Aldred London Trial 1909, Indian Sedition, Glasgow Sedition Trial 1921’, details various trials against Aldred, one of which was for publishing anticolonial newspaper The Indian Sociologist in the 1920s. He lost and was jailed, and a few years later was back inside a cell for publishing writings on birth control. In Barlinnie he was locked up alongside Glasgow schoolteacher and revolutionary John Maclean, himself the subject of another book in my collection, Maclean’s daughter Nan Milton’s landmark 1973 biography John Maclean. Aldred and Maclean reportedly got on famously, and significantly influenced each other’s politics.
Socialist Labour Press on Renfrew Street published both Marx’s Wage Labour and Capital and the far more entertaining Satires, Lyrics & Poems (Chiefly Humorous) by John S. Clarke. Born into a circus family, Clarke was a poet, a journalist, a politician and a lion tamer. In 1906 at the age of 21 he was arrested for conspiracy to smuggle arms from Scotland to revolutionary Russia. After going underground as a conscientious objector, Clarke was one of the Scottish representatives to the Second Congress of the Communist International where he famously cured Lenin’s dog of a mystery ailment thanks to his expertise with the circus animals. He briefly represented the people of Maryhill for the Independent Labour Party; you don’t get the impression he worked that hard at it. He enjoyed writing mock epitaphs for respected members of society, several of which are included in Satires, Lyrics & Poems. One victim was Lord Strathure, the judge who sentenced John Maclean to 5 years in Peterhead jail.
More poignantly, the book also contains ‘The Man In Peterhead’, a poem detailing the misery experienced by John Maclean in jail, and exhorting the reader to rise up alongside the rest of the workers to liberate him. This poem was printed as a twopenny broadside and sold to raise money for Maclean’s wife and children while he was incarcerated. It was later set to music, and by the fiftieth anniversary of Maclean’s death in 1973 it was being sung by folksingers, earning the work a place in the Scottish political song tradition. This tradition is represented in another item in the collection, the programme for The Cheviot, The Stag and the Black, Black Oil, the play by John McGrath. This version was staged by Wildcat, a radical theatre company which was an offshoot of the more famous 7:84 who staged the play for the first time in 1973.
I bought most of my collection from eBay, or specialist bookselling websites, while charity shops have also thrown up some gems. Workers City – a blistering critique of Glasgow’s gentrification via its 1990 crowning as European City of Culture – came from a charity shop, while its sequel The Reckoning came from the Communist Party bookshop Unity Books in Govanhill. The Cheviot programme is from my parents who saw the play in 1991, and the Socialist Sunday School Songbook came from a friend of a friend who rescued a box of them from a recycling bin when the Scottish Trades Union Congress were moving out of their old premises.
The collection also includes ephemera: zines, photobooks, stamps, a postcard, a theatre programme. One zine records the history of Glasgow’s Unity Centre, which provided practical support and solidarity to migrants for nearly 20 years. The zine is riso printed with that medium’s characteristic tones. Its brief, informative sections and flimsy paper remind me of the pamphlets of the radical publishers of a hundred years earlier.
Esperanto stamps illustrate the utopian and internationalist outlook of the world’s networked Esperanto-speaking community, of which Glasgow was a tiny part. In 1918, Glaswegians could gather in a room in Bridgeton to learn Esperanto, advertised in the back of Forward Newspaper as the International Language for International Socialists.
My books have been collected purposefully to be handled by groups of people, passed around in the streets in (almost) all Glasgow weather. I love this connection to their original purpose: this was literature cheaply printed, to be read and shared and fiercely debated. Given this, it feels all the more incredible to me that some have survived and are being passed hand to hand again in the 21st century. How did they make it through the decades? Imagine the book that sat proudly on a shelf for years, only to wind up in the charity shop as victim of a decluttering effort. The pamphlet carefully preserved in someone’s desk until death and house clearance led it to an antiquarian bookseller.
My favourite thing about these books is the way writers, publishers and events reappear across time. This extends further into the fabric of the city’s social and political life – in a recent Cranhill Arts exhibition I spotted a tiny rendering of Mrs Reid’s red flag on a banner from the 1990s.
I love being able to share these pieces of Glasgow’s history with strangers who have joined me to walk through the city streets. Yes, the odd dustjacket might get ripped, or someone might drop a book in the road, or the zine’s pages might get a bit waterlogged. Maybe a child in a skip in 1992 dislodged a colour plate. But despite all this, I think putting these texts into new hands is what they would have wanted: the writer, printers, organisers and dreamers of the city.
Katherine’s book collection won the 2026 David Murray Book Collecting Prize.
[All photos in this article, unless otherwise stated, were taken by the author.]