John Dewar Publishers, established in 2022, are the publishing arm of The Dewar Project. The company’s principal aim is to publish the work of the nineteenth-century collector of Gaelic historical tales, John Dewar. We plan to achieve this by means of a series of volumes which will come out approximately every two years:

• John Dewar’s Islay, Jura and Colonsay
• John Dewar’s Loch Lomond and Perthshire
• John Dewar’s Kintyre
• John Dewar’s Arran
• John Dewar’s Cowal
• John Dewar’s Inveraray, Mid Argyll and Knapdale
• John Dewar’s Appin and Lorn
• John Dewar’s Mull, Coll, Tiree and Morvern
• John Dewar’s Glencoe and the North
• John Dewar’s Other Stories

Each of these books will contain Dewar’s stories (in Gaelic and English, on facing pages), with explanatory notes, a gazetteer of place-names, maps, and illustrations in colour and black and white. The first, John Dewar’s Islay, Jura and Colonsay, will be published early in 2024. They will be available for purchase direct from this website in due course. Depending on demand, we may publish spin-offs from the series, such as John Dewar’s Robert Bruce and John Dewar’s Ossianic Ballads. However, we will also publish a very limited number of books unconnected with Dewar. The first of these is Galloway: The Lost Province of Gaelic Scotland.

John Dewar Publishers aim to publish books whose focus is the history of the people of the Highlands and Islands, especially as told by John Dewar. So our logo shows the kind of house that a typical character in Dewar’s stories would have lived in. The fire is in the middle of the floor, so there is no chimney, but the thatch has been gathered up to form a hole where the smoke from the fire can find its way out.

Acknowledgements

Thanks go to the Duke of Argyll and the National Library of Scotland for permission to use images from their collections.