D.C. Thomson

‘Flying the Flag for Dundee’

Fireworks from a 1938 Dandy

Abstract

We are delighted to welcome one of Britain’s most successful publishing companies to present a conference plenary session.

D. C. Thomson is now into its second century as a publisher of Scottish newspapers, magazines and children’s comics.

Best known for the Dandy and Beano and much-loved cartoon characters such as Dennis the Menace, Desperate Dan and Minnie the Minx, the Dundee company also produces the 144-year-old People’s Friend, regarded as the oldest women’s magazine in the world, the Scots Magazine, first published in 1739, which gave an eyewitness account of the defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden and reviewed an up-and-coming young poet – Robert Burns! – and The Sunday Post, once the most widely read national newspaper in the world.

The session will be introduced by Blair Thomson, who will discuss his family’s breadth of activities, focusing on its recently-commissioned £25 million press in Dundee, which includes Britain’s first heatset printing system.

Blair will also introduce the other companies in the D. C. Thomson Group, including IT business services provider brightSolid, which owns Scotland’s People and Friends Reunited: Aberdeen Journals, which publish the Press & Journal and Evening Express in Aberdeen; Parragon Books, a global books publisher based in Bath and the Puzzler Group, the leading publisher of puzzle magazines in the UK, based in Surrey.

Company Historian Norman Watson will then chart the history and innovations of the company – how, after growing out of a fleet of transatlantic steamships, it became one of the first publishers in the world to introduce multiple rotary printing, illustrations, photographs, even crosswords! – and the first anywhere to print a fully digitised newspaper.

Morris Heggie, comics expert and former editor of the Dandy, will round off the session by introducing the firm’s famous children’s papers – how, at one time or another, every family in Britain read the famous titles printed and published in Dundee by this historic family firm.

Comic Relief – 1960′s style