In addition to his work for the Edinburgh University Press, George Mackie designed, and often illustrated, a series of booklets for the National Trust for Scotland. It was a chance finding of one of these – the guide to Hugh Miller’s birthplace cottage and museum in Cromarty – that first alerted me to George’s rare ability to make of such an item a treasurable keepsake. He produced a dozen or more; they can be found occasionally in the pamphlet boxes of those secondhand bookshops that still have such repositories of unexpected delights, or even in charity shops.
