There is a graveyard in Inverness where impressive marble and granite graves jostle for prominence beneath evergreen conifers and stately oaks. The dead are carefully labelled here: blacksmiths, plumbers, merchants—lives chiselled into stone and set in orderly rows. At one end rises a wooded drumlin, Tomnahurich, the Hill of the Yew Trees, a place steeped in stories of fairies and seers and where there was talk of filming The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes. Climb it and the city opens out below you, crowned by a tall war memorial to the soldiers and sailors lost in the First World War.

What you are unlikely to notice, though, tucked away among the elaborate obelisks and sad-faced angels, is a pair of sticks lashed together to form a crude cross. It marks the resting place of Alexander MacKenzie, the Inverness publisher. I came across this rather disappointing tribute to publishing many years ago.

I should have been warned.