Family archive: Selected themes and cuttings

Three scrapbooks on top of each other numbered 1, 2, 3. The top scrapbook has a colourful design of a lion in the jungle.

Like many other proud relatives, Alasdair’s sister Mora has kept track of her brother’s activities in an ever-expanding series of scrapbooks which are still going strong today. The first entry was in 1951 and Alasdair donated miscellaneous items of interest whenever he remembered.

We've chosen 18 pages grouped into 5 themes that give you a sense of the archive and the way it developed over the years - together with the many annotations and comments Alasdair couldn’t resist adding when he sent the cuttings to his sister.

Select each picture to enlarge it.

Before anyone else was watching…

Mora started the scrapbooks in 1951 when her brother was still a schoolboy and a long way from being famous - although his talent for drawing and writing was evident from an early age.

An art school drawing dated 1957 and a leaflet advertising an exhibition of the Saturday Art Class, featuring a painting by the 17 year old Alasdair.

An early insight into Alasdair the painter and the man, from the Glasgow University Guardian May 1964.

Photographs taken by Alasdair’s Aunt Annie of some early murals - including the paintings in Greenhead Church which he describes in Lanark.

The year Lanark arrived…

Twenty-six years in the writing, Lanark was published in February 1981 and from that point on the cuttings start to arrive thick and fast.

Promotional material for Lanark featuring Alasdair’s handwritten comment about the words extraordinary, remarkable, important and breathtaking - ‘Don't be fooled by this sort of thing!’.

Note from Alasdair to Mora following the launch party for Lanark and commenting on his difficulty in keeping himself and his home ‘tidy and respectable’.

The review of Lanark in the Glasgow Herald notes that Alasdair began writing it when he was 18, in the break between leaving school and starting at art college.

Prizes, cheques and a much-corrected CV…

After Lanark the awards started arriving too, but Alasdair was generally more interested in correcting the record than in celebrating it.

Alasdair was the first winner of the Saltire Society Literary Award in 1982, which included a much-needed cheque for £1000 that he was evidently keen to accept.

Alasdair’s Literary CV from 1934-1985, with characteristic handwritten corrections and additions.

In 1992 Poor Things won the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel and The Guardian Fiction prize. You can find out more about the article titled The seamy side of sexless Scotland’ further down this page.

When the printers got it wrong…

Alasdair was a meticulous designer and corrector of his own work and of other people’s too - with publication being no barrier to his passion for accuracy and improvement.

Alasdair has the last word on his ‘FirstWord’ interview as he changes "discs" for records, "Campsies" for campuses and "munition workers" for miners.

A special September 2001 cover of the Celtic View magazine illustrated by Alasdair - accompanied by a note which starts ‘The cover, as reproduced, was got all wrong by the printer…’.

Alasdair’s note on this article in the Sunday Herald 2011 designates it ‘the worst layout of a page ever attributed to me, damn it!’ as he only had a day to complete it.

Love from Alasdair…

Alasdair posted cuttings to Mora for decades - usually with a note attached and often with an apology for the vanity and self-importance he felt it represented.

Alasdair’s note next to the headline ‘Colour of battle’ says ‘Dear Mora, Excuse my vanity! This is for your scrapbook!’

Alasdair’s painting Bella Caledonia was used as the First Minister of Scotland’s official Christmas card in 2011 and Alasdair’s note says, ‘for your scrapbook, if you like, says Alasdair.’

Alasdair offers his characteristically robust views on Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government and their suggestion that Scotland should cultivate tourism to combat unemployment.

Alasdair ditches his ongoing concerns about vanity as the excitement of seeing his art finally getting some attention prompts him to write: 'Get a load of this, Mora!'

Alasdair’s comment on this belated entry reads: ‘Yet another addition to what must be the complete archive of my publicity cuttings. There should be no more for a while…

Alasdair’s note says: ‘The longer I live and the less I produce worth celebrating, the more publicity machinists want to celebrate me. Let them!’

Julia Thrift speaks to Alasdair Gray for The Independent

Click the image to enlarge it or use this link for a full transcript.

This article was written by a friend of Kat’s after Poor Things was first published in 1992 and it gives an insight into Alasdair’s conversational style as well as his work.

“While it would be perfectly accurate to describe Alasdair Gray as a writer and artist, to do so would be to miss the point. Alasdair Gray is a subversive, a dryly humorous underminer of conventions, a ridiculer of humbug in the best Scottish tradition. He defies easy categorisation; he is a highly regarded author who is also an acclaimed and collected artist, a writer in his fifties who has a cult following among readers half his age.

After the publication of his first novel, Lanark, he was profiled by I-D magazine and described by Anthony Burgess as the first important Scottish writer since Sir Walter Scott - more diverse sources of kudos are hard to imagine. Gray’s books are intriguing objects in themselves. Illustrated by Gray’s distinctive pen and ink drawings, the text laid out according to his idiosyncratic views on typography, they are full of footnotes, both erudite and silly - Lewis Carroll or Beatrix Potter is just as likely to be cited as Milton or Kafka - and these, like the blurbs on the dust jackets, are not mere appendages, they are as much a part of Gray's creation as the text and the illustrations.” Julia Thrift