The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America

by Richard B. Sher

Overview

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas. 

In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The Life of Samuel Johnson were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits. 

The Enlightenment and the Book explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226752525
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	02/01/2007
Series:	Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Ser.
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	842
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 2.30(d)

About the Author

Richard B. Sher is Distinguished Professor of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is the author of Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh.

Read an Excerpt

The Enlightenment and the Book

Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America

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By Richard B. Sher

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.

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Chapter One

Toward a Book History of the Scottish Enlightenment

The Problem of Enlightenment Publishing

"To a man sincerely interested in the welfare of society and of his country, it must be particularly agreeable to reflect on the rapid progress, and general diffusion of learning and civility, which, within the present age, have taken place in Great Britain." So began the preface to one of the most popular books of the late eighteenth century, A New Geographical, Historical, and Commercial Grammar; and Present State of the Several Kingdoms of the World by William Guthrie, Esq., first published in London in 1770. After contrasting the state of British political culture with that found in "some other kingdoms of Europe," where "illiberal prejudices" prevailed, the preface continued: "Among us, learning is no longer confined within the schools of the philosophers, or the courts of the great; but, like all the greatest advantages which heaven has bestowed on mankind, it is become as universal as it is useful." Britain was leading the way not only in the "rapid progress" of learning but also in its dissemination, for only in Britain had the "general diffusion of knowledge" advanced to the point where "the great body of the people" could share in it. This had happened, on the one hand, because "in Great Britain, the people are opulent, have great influence, and claim, of course, a proper share of attention"-which is to say, they constitute a public. On the other hand, in Britain "books have been divested of the terms of the schools, reduced from that size which suited only the purses of the rich, and the avocations of the studious, and are adapted to persons of more ordinary fortunes, whose attachment to other pursuits admitted of little leisure for those of knowledge." The diffusion of learning through popular books is exalted, even over "the works of our Bacons, our Lockes, and our Newtons," as the means by which "the generality of our countrymen" have attained their "superior improvement" over their counterparts elsewhere.

The phenomenon described in the preface to Guthrie's Geography has become familiar to students of the Enlightenment and eighteenth-century British culture. "Print proved the great engine for the spread of enlightened views and values," wrote the late Roy Porter in his popular account of the Enlightenment in Britain. As part of an occurrence that Porter variously termed "the print explosion," "the print boom," and "print capitalism," "literature became a commodity circulating in all shapes and sizes" and "Britain found itself awash with print." Along with these developments on the supply side came changes in patterns of consumption, as "reading became second nature to a major swathe of the nation." Similarly, John Brewer has written perceptively on the "print revolution" that occurred in eighteenth-century Britain, involving both a "remarkable transformation in British publishing" (which he sometimes calls "the publishing revolution" or "the publication revolution") and an expansion in the quantity and variety of reading, as well as in the institutions that facilitated it, such as bookshops, different kinds of libraries (e.g., subscription, circulating, church, coffeehouse), book clubs, and private collections. Like Porter and the author of the preface to Guthrie's Geography, Brewer views these developments as intimately connected with the growth of "modern commerce and refinement." The findings of the learned, the diffusion of knowledge, enlightened attitudes, opulence, civility, and the rise of a broad and highly commercialized public culture were all inseparable from what Brewer calls more than once "the ubiquity of books."

Despite the notion of British exceptionalism that permeates the preface to Guthrie's Geography, many commentators who treat eighteenth-century culture within a broader geographical context have reached similar conclusions. Following the well-known thesis of J'rgen Habermas, James Van Horn Melton credits England with establishing a literary public sphere earlier than the rest of Europe, but by the time his account reaches the second half of the century, France and Germany are sharing in "the eighteenth-century print explosion." Similar views have been a fixture in social and cultural histories of the age of the Enlightenment since at least 1969, when the second volume of Peter Gay's seminal synthesis discussed the emergence of a broader reading audience, the appearance of lending libraries and coffeehouses, the development of publishing in place of aristocratic patronage, increasing financial compensation for enlightened authors, and the decline of censorship and repression as key features of the republic of letters. In a general survey of Europe published in 1982, Isser Woloch asserted that "the expansion of publishing and the growth of the reading public ... constituted the eighteenth century's pivotal cultural development." More recently, Thomas Munck has argued that "an unprecedented growth in the accessibility of the printed word to those who could read" was crucially important for the expression and proliferation of the Enlightenment, and T. C. W. Blanning's explicitly Habermasian account of Old Regime culture emphasizes "a revolutionary change in the production of books" and corresponding changes in the character and sites of reading. These developments have in turn been linked by Michel Foucault and others with the rise of modern institutional structures for categorizing and regulating both authors and books. In Carla Hesse's succinct summation, the modern literary system that arose in eighteenth-century Europe may be equated with "the civilization of the book," meaning "the stabilization of written culture into a canon of authorized texts, the notion of the author as creator, the book as property, and the reader as an elective public."

Britain, then, was not unique in developing a ubiquitous book culture that was intimately tied to the espousal and promulgation of the Enlightenment. That was to some degree a feature of the Enlightenment everywhere. Few would deny, however, that eighteenth-century Britain was in the vanguard of the movement. As the author of the preface to Guthrie's Geography and other contemporaries realized, printing and publishing faced fewer constraints there than on the Continent, with significant consequences. In the absence of most forms of censorship and other restrictive regulations, such as the one that limited the number of master printers in Old Regime Paris to thirty-six, the number of printing offices and bookshops increased dramatically in London and throughout Britain, and so did the quantity of accessible reading material, including books, periodicals, and newspapers. The Enlightenment book trade in Britain did not have to go underground or abroad, as was so often the case in France and other European countries, and the producers of learned books were not subject to the high degree of instability and uncertainty, as well as licensing requirements, that existed in seventeenth-century England. In spite of disagreements over the precise nature and duration of copyright, there was widespread acceptance in eighteenth-century Britain of the principle of copyright itself, extending at least the fourteen years (or twenty-eight years, if the author were still alive) allowed by the so-called Statute of Anne, the copyright act that went into effect in 1710 and was upheld as the law of the land on appeal to the House of Lords in 1774. There arose an auxiliary species of journals, such as the Monthly Review and the Critical Review, to guide the public's selection of the best new books. Books took their place within a burgeoning culture of material consumption and commercialization, well beyond what existed elsewhere.

All this is familiar enough. But the tendency to posit the existence of a print boom in eighteenth-century Britain has greatly outpaced our knowledge of what was actually taking place. We have many generalizations but little concrete understanding of the complex historical processes and interplay of human actors that connected the book trade to the Enlightenment. More than a quarter of a century has passed since Robert Darnton's pioneering publishing history of the Encyclopédie established book history as a vital component in Enlightenment studies. Since then there have been several excellent studies of individual Enlightenment publishers and their relations with authors, and book history has flourished and grown as a scholarly discipline. Despite differences among practitioners, there is universal agreement that the starting point for all approaches to the field is the conviction that books do in fact have histories which reveal a great deal about life as well as letters, and that books are therefore to be taken seriously in every possible mode in which they appear-as homes for texts written by authors and read by readers, as physical artifacts crafted by skilled and unskilled workers using particular technologies, as commodities bought and sold in the marketplace, as instruments for the transmission of knowledge and values, as fodder for great libraries and popular amusements, as objects of government regulation and censorship, as cultural symbols, and much more. Few historians of the book would deny that these modes are necessarily interrelated and therefore cannot be successfully studied in isolation from each other, or in isolation from the specific historical settings in which they occur. Yet the book history of the Enlightenment, especially the English-language Enlightenment, remains a story waiting to be told.

The second half of the eighteenth century was a particularly interesting time for author-publisher relations. It not only signified the beginning of modern notions of authorship as a commercial category but also marked a critical transitional era for publishers. During this period, substantial publishing houses emerged in Britain, but they were not yet the large, impersonal, specialized entities they would later become. Publishing was still something that members of the book trade did in addition to something else-usually bookselling (which accounts for the fact that publishers were still called "booksellers" much of the time) but in some cases printing or occasionally even bookbinding. Publishers were sometimes deeply involved with the works they produced, and authors who dealt with the leading publishing houses often had direct, substantive contact with the head of the firm. "Cadell and I are going to prepare the second edition of 'Fatal Falsehood'-," wrote Hannah More to her sister in 1780. "We talked over all the affairs. He gave me some very good advice." There was nothing unusual about this exchange, even though Thomas Cadell was then at the head of the largest and most prestigious publishing enterprise in Britain, if not in the world.

The success of books depended on publishers in many ways. In the process of generating new books, publishers had to make critical decisions about whether to publish, when to publish, and in what format to publish, as well as how to promote published books, how much to charge for them, and how much to pay authors for them. Of course, to say that eighteenth-century publishers had important choices to make does not mean that they were free to do whatever they pleased. Various kinds of factors-technological, economic, institutional, legal, cultural, intellectual, ideological-operated at many levels to restrict and direct choices. But such factors did not always point toward the same conclusion, and publishers were therefore able to operate with a great deal of freedom most of the time.

The actions of publishers were not strictly determined by external forces such as the economic or technological "logic" of print, or print capitalism, favored by Alvin Kernan, or the equally rigid theory of monopoly with which William St. Clair explains book production in the period 1710-74. Nor were they virtually free of technological and other material constraints, as others have suggested or implied. "Is history conditioned by print, or print by history?" Adrian Johns asks in his debate with Elizabeth Eisenstein on the status of early modern printing, answering that "the latter is the case." Perhaps the best response to Johns's question, however, is to reject its either/or premise and to opt instead for another formulation by Johns himself, "that print is conditioned by history as well as conditioning it." To the extent that print can be considered apart from history at all, the relationship between print and history, like that of any technology and history, is complex and dialectical; neither one is caused or conditioned exclusively by the other. Technologies like printing do not dictate or determine the course of history, but they frequently create conditions, opportunities, and constraints that influence the construction of cultures, just as cultural factors shape the social construction of technologies. Because eighteenth-century British printing was famously free of technological innovation and firmly rooted in a secure commercial system, Enlightenment publishers operated within a relatively stable environment in which the social construction of printing over the course of several centuries was taken for granted.

The publishing process was too complex to conform to any simple formula. Enlightenment book publishing cannot be reduced either to unrestrained outbursts of authorial creativity (as historians of ideas often assume) or to business endeavors involving the production and distribution of marketable commodities (as historians of books sometimes insinuate). In the second half of the eighteenth century, publication of new books was almost always a cooperative act or partnership between authors and publishers. Often these partnerships were harmonious and polite, and occasionally they were intimate, but sometimes they were tense and strained, even hostile, as one might expect when the stakes involve not only money but also status and cultural authority. Enlightenment book publishing, then, was a negotiated, collaborative, often contested activity that occurred within the economic, technological, legal, and intellectual contexts of the day.

The more Enlightenment book culture is viewed as the product of interaction between authors and members of the book trade, contingent to a large degree on decisions made by publishers within a given technological and social setting, the more important are questions concerning the roles of publishers and authors and their relationships with each other, as well as with that mystical, abstract entity known in the eighteenth century, and ever since, as "the public." Publishers naturally paid close attention to economic self-interest when making decisions about publishing and marketing books, but other motives frequently came into play as well. To the extent that such motives were personal, ideological, and yes, intellectual, they form a contrast with the businesslike persona that publishers frequently tried to project, especially when dealing with authors. Authors too had complicated agendas, and they therefore should not be treated as rarefied intellectuals who were unconcerned with fame, money, and other factors besides the substance of their texts. As John Brewer has remarked: "Both bookseller and author shared in the balancing act between pecuniary reward and intellectual interest that gave eighteenth-century publishing much of its energy."

In their capacity as the managers of printers, stationers, and binders, publishers were largely responsible for translating authors' texts into material reality. They were therefore critically important in helping to determine not only which books would be produced but also how those books would look. Their central position between texts and books had implications that extended into the public realm. Foucault's famous concept of the "author function" has rightly drawn attention to the author's name as the primary mode of categorizing books. It also seems appropriate to speak of a "publisher function," however, because in the late eighteenth century, like today, the names of publishers could be as important as those of authors in providing the public with a mechanism for organizing and prioritizing books.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Preface
Author’s Note
 
Introduction
Toward a Book History of the Scottish Enlightenment
Designs and Disclaimers
 
Part I. Scottish Authors in a World of Books
 
1. Composing the Scottish Enlightenment
            Progress through Print
            Building a Database of Scottish Enlightenment Authors and Books
 
2. Identity and Diversity among Scottish Authors
            The Social Contexts of Authorship
            Unity and Representation
 
3. The Rewards of Authorship
            Patrons, Publishers, and Places
            Copy Money and Its Uses
 
Part II. Publishing the Scottish Enlightenment in London and Edinburgh
 
4. Forging the London–Edinburgh Publishing Axis
            The Framework of Collaborative Publishing
            The Founding Publishers and Their Firms
 
5. The Heyday of Scottish Enlightenment Publishing
            The House of Strahan and Cadell
            Successors and Rivals
 
6. The Achievement of William Creech
            The Career of a Bookseller
            The Reputation of a Bookseller
 
Part III. Reprinting the Scottish Enlightenment in Dublin and Philadelphia 

7. The Rise and Fall of Irish Reprinting
            Publishers or Pirates?
            In the Company of Dublin Booksellers
 
8. Making Scottish Books in America, 1770–1784
            The Scottish Enlightenment and the American Book Trade
            The Emergence of Scottish Enlightenment Reprinting in America
 
9. “A More Extensive Diffusion of Useful Knowledge”: Philadelphia, 1784–1800
            Atlantic Crossings: Carey, Dobson, Young, and Campbell
            Immigrant Booksellers and Scotch Learning
 
Conclusion
            The Disintegration of the London–Edinburgh Publishing Axis
            The Pattern of Scottish Enlightenment Book History
 
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Reading the fruits of Sher's labour . . . is a wonderfully pleasurable—and wholly enlightening—experience. Wearing his erudition lightly, Sher not only writes in attractively accessible, and often alliterative prose, but he also displays a keen eye for the telling vignette."

Canadian Journal of History - Clare Jackson

"The Enlightenment and the Book triumphantly unites the study of authors with the study of texts, and forges a better understanding of the relationship between those who wrote books and those who sold them. . . . A compelling, immensely studious, and thought-provoking testament to the best that the history of the book is now able to offer."

Library - David Allan

"Book history is well served by this study, which has methodological as well as substantive claims to make. . . . This long-awaited and massive study will be consulted somewhat selectively by many, but it is nonetheless an important book."

Eifghteenth-Century Life - Roger L. Emerson

"Sher has sunk a deep shaft down into an extremely dense pile of sources, and his work will no doubt serve as a reference point for historians of print culture and reading practices for years to come. . . . It raises the bar to a new level for scholars of eighteenth-century Scottish thought who are serious about the cultural history of ideas and who prefer specific examples over brushstroke theorizing."

Isis - M. D. Eddy

"A major achievement."

Times Literary Supplement

Sher provides a richly detailed map of the Scottish Enlightenment’s progress across the Atlantic, using book history as a navigational tool. Historians of the book in America will find here a wealth of new information and a fresh transatlantic perspective on the development of book publishing in the late eighteenth century.”James N. Green, Library Company of Pennsylvania and coauthor of Benjamin Franklin, Writer and Printer

James N. Green

This is a pioneering work that constitutes a really important contribution to book history and Enlightenment studies.”Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, University of Michigan

Elizabeth Eisenstein

"Discerningly illustrated, at once scholarly and accessible, this is an essential addition not only to 18th-century studies but also to the history of the book."

Atlantic

"A powerful, challenging and comprehensive study. . . . It is unquestionably a landmark contribution that will shape discussions of the Enlightenment, book history and Scottish intellectual advances for years to come."

SHARP News - Christopher Flint

"A monumental achievement"

Eighteenth-Century Studies - Evan Gottlieb

"If bibliography is out, the consolation is that the history of the book is in. Richard Sher applies the concerns and research techniques of book history to the Scottish Enlightenment and he is well qualified to do it."

Notes & Queries - M.A. Box

"Sher brings to bear an enormous wealth of learning gained through years of painstaking archival research. It is a remarkable achievement which should become required reading for eighteenth-century British cultural and social historians."

H-Net Reviews - Bob Harris

"Richard Sher's study of Edinburgh Enlightenment books is the most valuable work I have read in over a decade, and my specialty is not eighteenth-century Scotland. . . . I found it a compelling story, superbly organized and illustrated. . . .With heart, vision, and art, this tome fundamentally embodies the patriotic and enlightened campaign for Scottish learning that it celebrates."

Eighteenth-Century Scotland - James E. May

The Enlightenment and the Book is the missing link in the history of publishing. It connects the traditions of Britain and America and explains how the people and practices of the book trade shaped the very culture of intellectual tolerance that defined the Enlightenment. This is a remarkable achievement of social and intellectual history that will become a classic.”Barbara M. Benedict, author of Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry

Barbara Benedict

"This elegant study . . . transforms our understanding of eighteenth-century book making. It brilliantly succeeds as a fusion of the history of ideologies with the history of the material circumstances of textual production."

The Book Collector - James Raven

"This is an exceptional piece of work. It is both an astonishing accumulation of informative detail and a multiplicity of lively interconnected narratives of authors, books, booksellers, printers and other subjects. It is a very useful reference book, with its nearly 150 pages of tables and bibliographies; it is also an engaging and stimulating read."

Review of English Studies - Antonia Forster

"There is no question that this is an authoritative and rich account of the ways in which the Scottish publishing industry both arose from and helped disseminate internationally the core values of the Enlightenment. . . . This book is a remarkable feat of scholarship, and scholars will find in it a wealth of historical information and reference material. And, at the same time, Sher presents a compelling reassessment of the relationship between book history and the production of both national and cosmopolitan (and often transatlantic) exchanges."

Tilar J. Mazzeon Historical Review

"If the Enlightenment in general was a phenom­enon of print, as many both then and since have claimed, then its Edinburgh incarna­tion was perhaps the clearest case in point. Richard Sher's mammoth study sets out to make that point empirically. The product of many years' dedicated researches in archives across Britain, Ireland, and the United States, it recovers in detail the myriad ways in which a major cultural 'movement,' as he calls it, could take shape and effect through the publication and circulation of books."

Journal of Modern History - Adrian Johns

"A work of great interest not only to those who study this period of Scottish history or literature, but also to anyone who has an abiding interest in the history of the book or bookmaking in general."  

Bloomsbury Review - Michael G. Cornelius

Richard Sher’s The Enlightenment and the Book is not just an indispensible research tool for anyone interested in the Scottish Enlightenment, but a rich, wide-ranging and beautifully researched study of how Scottish ideas spread throughout the Anglophone world.

John Brewer

"Book history is well served by this study, which has methodological as well as substantive claims to make. . . . This long-awaited and massive study will be consilted somewhat selectively by many, but it is nonetheless an important book."

— Roger L. Emerson

Eifghteenth-Century Life

"There is no question that this is an authoritative and rich account of the ways in which the Scottish publishing industry both arose from and helped disseminate internationally the core values of the Enlightenment. . . . This book is a remarkable feat of scholarship, and scholars will find in it a wealth of historical information and reference material. And, at the same time, Sher presents a compelling reassessment of the relationship between book history and the production of both national and cosmopolitan (and often transatlantic) exchanges."

American Historical Review - Tilar J. Mazzeo

In 1757, when philosopher David Hume boasted that the Scots were "the People most distinguish'd for Literature in Europe," he was undoubtedly pitching it a bit strong. But as Sher (Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment) notes in his conclusion to this mammoth and definitive work, "less than fifty years later that boast had considerably more merit than most contemporaries might have thought possible when it was first uttered." At its core, this is a painstaking investigation of how Scotland became a wellspring of Enlightenment books, an achievement Sher argues came about through the efforts of authors and publishers who shared and benefited from a complex and symbiotic relationship. The book is divided into three parts, with Part 1 focusing on the authors of Scottish Enlightenment books (e.g., John Gregory, Adam Smith), Part 2 looking at the principal publishers of these works in London and Edinburgh (e.g., Andrew Millar, William Strahan), and Part 3 examining the reprinting of these works by publishers in Dublin and Philadelphia. An appendix features seven tables that organize the data on the people and works discussed throughout. This extraordinary work of scholarship is essential for all research libraries.
—William D. Walsh

Library Journal

"Sher's book is a long-awaited magnum opus which proves to be a most valuable source of information on many topics in the fields both of Scottish Enlightenment studies and of the history of the book. . . . As such, it is to be warmly welcomed."

Print Quarterly - Iain Gordon Brown

"Sher has written an important book on the Scottish Englightenment, a book that should change the ways students look at the subject for years to come. . . . This is a well-written and informative study; it is hoped that the wide audience it deserves."

Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer - O M Brack Jr.

This elegant study . . . transforms our understanding of eighteenth-century book making. It brilliantly succeeds as a fusion of the history of ideologies with the history of the material circumstances of textual production.

— James Raven

The Book Collector

A monumental achievement

— Evan Gottlieb

Eighteenth-Century Studies

A powerful, challenging and comprehensive study. . . . It is unquestionably a landmark contribution that will shape discussions of the Enlightenment, book history and Scottish intellectual advances for years to come.

— Christopher Flint

SHARP News

Book history is well served by this study, which has methodological as well as substantive claims to make. . . . This long-awaited and massive study will be consilted somewhat selectively by many, but it is nonetheless an important book.

— Roger L. Emerson

Eighteenth-Century Life

There is no question that this is an authoritative and rich account of the ways in which the Scottish publishing industry both arose from and helped disseminate internationally the core values of the Enlightenment. . . . This book is a remarkable feat of scholarship, and scholars will find in it a wealth of historical information and reference material. And, at the same time, Sher presents a compelling reassessment of the relationship between book history and the production of both national and cosmopolitan (and often transatlantic) exchanges.

— Tilar J. Mazzeo

American Historical Review

Reading the fruits of Sher's labour . . . is a wonderfully pleasurable—and wholly enlightening—experience. Wearing his erudition lightly, Sher not only writes in attractively accessible, and often alliterative prose, but he also displays a keen eye for the telling vignette.

— Clare Jackson

Canadian Journal of History

Sher has written an important book on the Scottish Englightenment, a book that should change the ways students look at the subject for years to come. . . . This is a well-written and informative study; it is hoped that the wide audience it deserves.

— O M Brack Jr.

Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer

Sher brings to bear an enormous wealth of learning gained through years of painstaking archival research. It is a remarkable achievement which should become required reading for eighteenth-century British cultural and social historians.

— Bob Harris

H-Net Reviews

Sher's book is a long-awaited magnum opus which proves to be a most valuable source of information on many topics in the fields both of Scottish Enlightenment studies and of the history of the book. . . . As such, it is to be warmly welcomed.

— Iain Gordon Brown

Print Quarterly

Sher has sunk a deep shaft down into an extremely dense pile of sources, and his work will no doubt serve as a reference point for historians of print culture and reading practices for years to come. . . . It raises the bar to a new level for scholars of eighteenth-century Scottish thought who are serious about the cultural history of ideas and who prefer specific examples over brushstroke theorizing.

— M. D. Eddy

Isis

A work of great interest not only to those who study this period of Scottish history or literature, but also to anyone who has an abiding interest in the history of the book or bookmaking in general."  

— Michael G. Cornelius

Bloomsbury Review

The Enlightenment and the Book triumphantly unites the study of authors with the study of texts, and forges a better understanding of the relationship between those who wrote books and those who sold them. . . . A compelling, immensely studious, and thought-provoking testament to the best that the history of the book is now able to offer.

— David Allan

Library

This is an exceptional piece of work. It is both an astonishing accumulation of informative detail and a multiplicity of lively interconnected narratives of authors, books, booksellers, printers and other subjects. It is a very useful reference book, with its nearly 150 pages of tables and bibliographies; it is also an engaging and stimulating read.

— Antonia Forster

Review of English Studies

Richard Sher's study of Edinburgh Enlightenment books is the most valuable work I have read in over a decade, and my specialty is not eighteenth-century Scotland. . . . I found it a compelling story, superbly organized and illustrated. . . .With heart, vision, and art, this tome fundamentally embodies the patriotic and enlightened campaign for Scottish learning that it celebrates.

— James E. May

Eighteenth-Century Scotland