Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland – serie

In this volume a range of distinguished contributors provide an original analysis of the book in Scotland during a period that has been until now greatly under-researched and little understood.The issues covered by this volume include the professionalisation of publishing, its scale, technological developments, the role of the state, including the library service, the institutional structure of the book in Scotland, industrial relations, union activity and organisation, women and the Scottish book, and the economics of publishing. Separate chapters cover Scottish publishing and literary culture, publishing genres, the art of print culture, distribution, and authors and readers. The volume also includes an innovative use of illustrative case studies.

The first thorough study of the book trade during the age of Fergusson and Burns.The eighteenth century saw Scotland become a global leader in publishing, both through landmark challenges to the early copyright legislation and through the development of intricate overseas markets that extended across Europe, Asia and the Americas. Scots in Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Dublin and Philadelphia amassed fortunes while bringing to international markets classics in medicine and economics by Scottish authors, as well as such enduring works of reference as the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Entrepreneurship and a vigorous sense of nationalism brought Scotland from financial destitution at the time of the 1707 Union to extraordinary wealth by the 1790s. Publishing was one of the country's elite new industries.Over forty leading scholars come together in this volume to examine the development of Scotland's book trade from 1707 to 1800. Printing, binding, bookselling, libraries, textbooks, distribution and international trade, copyright, piracy, literacy, music publication, women readers, children's books and cookery books are among the many aspects of print culture that they scrutinize.Key Features* Discusses copyright and piracy with new data at a time when intellectual property laws are returning to eighteenth-century precedents* Provides new understandings of Scotland's early modern readerships, including women's libraries, music literacy, and the way in which Scots found in the growth of literacy an international marketplace for intellectual property* Original scholarship and previously unpublished source material on secular Gaelic print* 16 exclusive full colour images of rare Scottish bindings from private collections, 25 additional colour plates + 60 b&w illustrations

This volume provides a wide and varied account of the history of the book during the medieval and early modern period, up to the Union of the Parliaments in 1707. The medieval and early modern periods saw the foundations and early development of Scottish book culture. While the process began, and continued, with manuscript books, from the middle of the sixteenth century Scotland was also fully participating in the European community of print, importing large quantities of printed books from England and Continental Europe and building up an independent press and bookselling network. In a range of accessible and stimulating chapters written by experts in the field of Scottish book history, emphasis is given to domestic manuscript production in Latin, Scots and Gaelic and the importation of manuscripts and printed books before 1560, as well as to the subsequent expansion in the production and consumption of print. The volume is divided into four sections. The first considers domestic manuscript and printed book production, organization and law, and the second importation, bookselling and ownership of manuscripts and printed books by individuals and institutions.Sections three and four cover topics such as education, politics, music and song, and literature and verse. In section four the book in Scotland is also viewed through various prisms, including anglicisation, humanism and the Reformation. One of the special features of this volume is the series of case studies which are distributed throughout and which consider the role of specific printers, booksellers, libraries, collectors and authors.

Over two parts, 69 leading scholars, librarians and archivists come together to analyse the development of the book in Scotland from the early seventh century BCE to the 1707 Union, from depictions of books in carved stone monuments to the printing presses of Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Glasgow producing pamphlets and receipts used for everyday business at the end of the seventeenth century.Part II: Networks, Collections and Genre focuses on the types of books and printed material that were being made, produced, collected and used in Scotland in the medieval and early modern periods. On a scale not before attempted, Part II includes a survey of the genres of books and written material produced and consumed in Scotland over a millennium of the country’s history. Profiles of individual collectors help to illustrate the wider narratives of individuals, institutions and networks of the owners, collectors and patrons who helped shaped the bookish landscape of Scotland before the Union.