The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (review)

Only rarely is it a bad time to publish a very good book; but it is equally rare that a good book should appear at such an auspicious moment. This is the case, however, with Richard Sher's The Enlightenment and the Book, a substantial, highly original and profoundly considered contribution to our understanding of eighteenth-century book culture that has very recently also been enhanced by James Raven's The Business of Books (New Haven, 2007) and by the participants in the second volume of the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (Cambridge, 2006), which also deals with the same period. Accordingly it serves to indicate the current state of the discipline, at once revealing how much we now know about certain aspects of book culture in the British Enlightenment and also gesturing in the direction that future scholarship in this field may yet wish to move.

This is in no way to diminish the sheer uniqueness of Sher's contribution. Indeed, as the subtitle reveals, it takes as its distinctive focus the role of Scottish booksellers and their relationship with Scottish authors in promoting in textual form throughout the anglophone world the distinctive version of contemporary intellectual and literary culture that has subsequently come to be identified as the Scottish Enlightenment. Sher's qualifications for this task are exemplary. A previous monograph, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, 1985), which remains a much-cited text, established his reputation as a leading authority on Scotland's enlightened intelligentsia, whose personal backgrounds, common interests, and individual idiosyncrasies he sketched in unprecedented detail. A succession of shorter studies has indicated Sher's gravitation towards the history of the book — notably articles on the publishing history of works by William Buchan, William Robertson, and Adam Smith, as well as essays on the Edinburgh Booksellers' Society and the printing activities of Andrew Millar. Readers of The Enlightenment and the Book who are familiar with such publications will recognize it as their brilliant consummation. For it offers a comprehensive survey of Scottish authorship, printing, and bookselling, which benefits greatly from Sher's characteristic interest in reconstructing not only the personalities involved but also their relationships with one another — to create a whole that, rather like the Moderate literati of Edinburgh, was unmistakably greater than the sum of its constituent parts.

The wider interest of this book, beyond the confines of Scottish Enlightenment studies, should also be underlined. It is not unknown for Scottish historians to be accused (in fact, to accuse one another, only half in jest) of 'jock-spotting' — meaning the arid pursuit of individuals with more or less tenuous Scottish affiliations whose historical significance in almost any field of human endeavour can then be proudly proclaimed. What The Enlightenment and the Book demonstrates, however, is the absolute centrality of a network of Scottish booksellers, some in Edinburgh but several also occupying commanding positions in London, to the development of the eighteenth-century book trade and thus to the formation and shaping of the broader culture of the age. Books, after all, as Sher insists, 'were the basic building blocks of the Enlightenment, an edifice erected one book at a time' (p. 597), and his study provides a sophisticated analysis of how one important series of books, and behind them one set of writers from a hitherto peripheral region of the British world, were able to make the impact that they did.

The processes involved in making and retailing books, moreover, taking place within a nexus of business contacts and personal connections, were to be as important to the achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment as considerations of intrinsic intellectual quality in the texts themselves or indeed the unusual levels of genius among Scotland's growing tribe of ambitious authors. Hard-nosed...