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  • The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America
  • Nicole Howard (bio)
The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America. By Richard B. Sher . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007 Pp. xxvi+815. $40.

Richard Sher's work is an impressive and detailed examination of Scottish Enlightenment publishers that reveals just how robust book history can be when the bibliographic details are tethered to a broader historical picture. Sher focuses on publishing activities between 1746 and 1800 in Edinburgh and London, as well as on the business of reprinting Enlightenment works in Dublin and Philadelphia. His broader aim is to address the "negotiated, collaborative and often contested activity" of book publishing during the Enlightenment in a way that avoids generalizations by being solidly rooted in empirical evidence. This means extensive analysis of tables he has compiled, including one that lists 360 works of the Scottish Enlightenment along with bibliographic information and publishing details for the first British, Irish, and American editions. The data he has culled from these books allow Sher to consider the way in which the "publisher function" (akin to Michel Foucault's "author function") served the development and expansion of the Scottish Enlightenment.

The first third of The Enlightenment and the Book treats the nature of authorship in Scotland. Sher describes the way many authors worked with—and were fashioned by—their patron-like publishers, who not only determined what was printed, but also how it appeared, from the format (quarto or octavo) to the length to the binding. Especially interesting here is the wide array of arrangements publishers were willing to make with authors. Some authors were able to sell the rights to their work in advance, while others—such as Robert Burns—were sold on subscription. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was initially published based on a profit-sharing arrangement with the powerful London publishing house of Andrew Strahan and Thomas [End Page 263] Cadell, while James Boswell self-published his Life of Johnson. Sher convincingly shows how an array of creative contracts fostered an author-friendly environment that stimulated Enlightenment publishing and left both author and publisher on a solid financial footing.

In part 2, Sher turns from authors to publishers, and here his aim is twofold. First, he wants to dispel any notion that Scottish Enlightenment publishers were all alike. He does so by examining no fewer than twelve publishers in Edinburgh and London—including Andrew Millar (who published Hume in 1748), William Strahan, Alexander Kincaid, and John Bell—all of whom cultivated authors and built publishing houses with unique strengths and reputations. The amount of detail offered about these publishers can be daunting, but Sher is keen on demonstrating the complexity of the publishing world. Letters between William Creech in Edinburgh and Strahan in London, for example, spell out in detail their efforts to manage their authors, their investments, and constant copyright issues, including those "scandalous abridgements" that they felt threatened their business (p. 357).

Sher's second and larger aim in this part of the book is to demonstrate a high level of publisher agency in the Scottish Enlightenment, in a way that challenges Robert Darnton's characterization of publishers as neutral brokers in the book culture. Rather, Sher deftly shows that these publishers were motivated by a host of factors, including a desire for status and fame (not unlike the authors they made famous), a sense of national pride for their fellow Scots, strong bonds with particular authors whom they had cultivated, and an even stronger sense that their work as publishers allowed them to carry important values and ideas to a wide audience. As Creech wrote to James Beattie in 1789, "I feel a pride in being your publisher for I love the man and I love his works. Be assured you deal with no mercenary vendor of literature" (pp. 418–19).

Sher devotes the final third of his book to the publishers in Dublin and Philadelphia who reprinted Scottish Enlightenment works in what he views as an act of cultural appropriation. Reprinting was a lucrative business, but not...

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