The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. iv: Professionalism and Diversity, 1880–2000 (review)

The third volume of this four-part series was reviewed at length in the previous issue of The Library. Its successor deals with a somewhat longer period, the final years of which — taking us to J. K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith, and beyond — necessarily jump from an historical to a predictive approach. The project as a whole has the advantage of extensive documentation, both business and literary, and even in the records of the printing trade unions, collected in the last half century and more in major national and university archives, notably in the manuscripts department of the National Library of Scotland. English historians of the book must feel a twinge of envy at this useful concentration of research material in Scottish institutions. It covers the principal firms, and many of the principal literary authors, though there is still much to be done in the simple historical registration of the Scottish book trades. Having been set a useful general framework in this substantial volume, one hopes that this archival treasure, hitherto somewhat neglected from the book-history point of view, will find itself given the attention it deserves.

The story continues from Volume 3 with the consolidation of the principal firms, in printing and publishing alike, several of them still sustaining a major export trade until the First World War and after. The gradual decline of family involvement in the printing as well as the publishing businesses of Scotland was a phenomenon — not of course a specifically Scottish one — that took the best part of a century to complete. It could well have formed a dominant theme for this volume, for the dynastic record overlaps with economic history. But it is good to have a different historical approach, from which it is possible to isolate only a few themes here.

There are twenty-eight contributors in all, some of them with only a very few pages of subsidiary special studies to their name. The principal chapters are too much interrupted by boxed short texts inside light rules. These vary greatly in quality. Some are rather useful, especially in case studies of individual periodicals, but others seem to belong to the history of Scottish literature rather than to the business of publication. The placing of some of them seems rather odd and generally they interrupt the flow of their chapters. The greater themes, such as decline within the industry and takeovers by English firms, need all the prominence they deserve.

The sections devoted to libraries are well presented, expanding on the Scottish chapters of the Cambridge History of Libraries. There are some discoveries here, such as the P. M. Dott Memorial Socialist Library, which gets boxed-feature treatment; one wonders whether this Edinburgh foundation, dissolved in the 1950s, had counterparts in more industrialized areas. The longevity of subscription libraries is perhaps exaggerated. Douglas & Foulis in Edinburgh (which amazingly survived until 1976), and Boots’s libraries more generally, were struggling long before they expired, but even in their genteel decline they are interesting phenomena.

Specifically Scottish themes are well dealt with. Gaelic books, in small but steady numbers, sustained by small grants and specialist publishers, are obviously a national particularity, as indeed is much Presbyterian theology. Gaelic texts are treated to a good small chapter, even if it offers little by way of comparison with Welsh-language publishing, which might well have offered parallels. Another local phenomenon, with an even greater importance furth of the realm, is provided by Dundee, in the shape of the D. C. Thomson Company’s stable of comics, Dandy and Beano chief among them. Their proprietors are notoriously parsimonious in providing commercial details, but even so a fair account is given of this great national export.

Primary and secondary education in Scotland used to have their distinctive curricula, and there were major publishing initiatives to meet...