The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, II: Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707-1800 (review)

The multipart archipelagic histories of the book that are now advancing steadily towards completion, for the Irish book, for the book in Scotland, and for the book in Britain, accompanied by the Welsh volume A Nation and its Books (1998), have both gained and lost by a certain independence of vision, compilation, and publication. It was never going to be possible to encompass the whole within Britain, quite apart from the political realities of different periods, and for this reason this was designed so as to be allusive where necessary, offering a kind of balance but eventually relying on the more regionally focused series. This was a point made explicitly in some of the Britain volumes. In Volume v (1695-1830), the equivalent for Scotland Volume ii, the editors made space for fifteen or so pages on the Scottish trade, by Iain Bevan and Warren McDougall — the latter one of the editors of the volume under review — and 'Scotland' takes up well over a column in the index. But this was necessarily brief, in earnest of what was to come. Now the Scottish Enlightenment, the years leading up to it, and the years that followed, have at last received proper treatment. It has been worth the wait.

In six long chapters and an introduction, the editors have divided their forty further contributors among almost seventy sections, some of as little as three or four pages, others rather more substantial. Chapters on the emergence of the modern trade, developing a marketplace, exchanges with abroad, the popular press, publishing the Enlightenment, and Scottishness and the book trade inevitably overlap: Gaelic books, for example, appear in two quite separate places, not quite integrated, one under marketplace, the other in the last section of all, on secular Gaelic publishing. Overall what emerges as an often fragmentary approach permits special attention to be paid to particular books or institutions, but it is not one that necessarily makes for an evenly paced volume. Thus the useful chapter by Ann Matheson on religion is followed by four pages, all too brief given their international success, on Hugh Blair's sermons. At slightly more length, and somewhat indulgent given the tight space elsewhere, Howard Gaskill's eight pages on Ossian in Europe compares with the rather larger issue of relations with America — here considerably supplementing the first volume of the History of the Book in America. By such means are the various national histories gradually woven together. Amidst the promising theme of other Scottish authors abroad — in Germany, Russia, Asia, France — supported by a twelve-page chapter on Hume's Political Discourses in France, Thomas Ahnert on Germany is remarkable for nowhere mentioning the work of Bernhard Fabian.

While there is inevitably some repetition from the equivalent Britain volume, in other respects this builds upon it: in the discussion of the trade's printed output for the main centres, for example, where there are useful caveats about the imbalance created in Edinburgh by the high proportion of legal and university printing. There is an obvious more general warning here about raw statistics. For the most celebrated and far-reaching case of all in Anglo-Scottish trade, Donaldson v. Becket, both Britain and Scotland merit consultation for their complementary accounts. On the other hand, the passages on the techniques of letterpress and intaglio printing could have been enriched by reference to the authoritative pages by James Mosley and Tim Clayton in Britain. The interesting questions here are not expository, but comparative, as the late John Morris suggests; and on these subjects there is work still to do.

In one major respect this volume differs from most others of its ilk. If some of the chapters are recastings of material drawn from work published elsewhere, a few others address archival sources directly, and — usefully — in rather more detail than...