The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland: Volume 3: Ambition and Industry, 1800‐1880

Readers who have been anticipating the publication of this work will, first of all, be very pleased to see it at last in print, and, second, wish to know that Edinburgh University Press promise us the first two volumes of the four in January 2009. Volume 1 will cover the medieval period to 1707 and volume 2 will cover the period 1707‐1800 with the title Enlightenment and Expansion. So this work, announced as “a compelling account of the history of the Scottish book”, will fill a gap in the field, gathering together into a coherent historical framework a lot of evidence, commentary and analysis that have existed, if at all, in all sorts of diverse places up to now. Bill Bell (director of the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh) edited volume three. The contributing editors for volume four are professor of literature and culture and director of the Scottish Centre for the Book at Napier University Edinburgh (Alistair McCleery) and research professor of media and print culture at Queen Margaret University Edinburgh (David Finkelstein), and both are widely known for other work in this field.

It will be good eventually to read – and review – the whole four‐volume set but, until then, suffice to review the two later volumes, three and four. You can see from their titles that they do not only cover specific periods but also try to follow and develop particular themes. The period 1800‐1880 was one in which industrialization and literacy/readership grew, in which dynastic publishing companies developed in the home market and for export, and where names like Blackie and Nelson, Black and Collins, Constable and Strachan were known throughout the UK and beyond. The case made for and in volume four is that of professionalization and diversity, a decline of paternalism and an arguable growth of professional book (and other media) publishers and booksellers (or at least they called themselves by that name), and an uneven diversity in publishing in the face of globalization and conglomeration. Throughout both the relationship between what is the distinctively Scottish market and the UK market – above all where publishers worked through London distribution points (and still do) – is an important semantic theme, picked up, gratifyingly, in at least two essays in volume three.

In any work setting out, ambitiously, to cover so wide a field – in fact, “everything” – readers will have the very highest expectations: after all, paying out the best part of what will end up being about £400 is a big investment for a library. Several impressions hit me straightaway – the wish, unevenly realised, to provide a firm commercial/economic and cultural/historical setting for the material; a tendency to privilege literature above most other things (and see the trade through the eyes and evidence of authors); the need, largely convincing, to sub‐divide history into necessarily‐arbitrary periods or zones so that individual topics can be dealt with; strengths and weaknesses associated (in volume four) by the persistent intervention of case studies, many by the contributing editors; a wealth of evidence derived from original research by some of the contributors (above all in volume three) compared with a more functional determination to snapshot key players and ideas in others (this last feature leads to some inevitable overlaps, most noticeable if read the books rather than merely consult them); the helpfully generous bibliography provided by both volumes, and the high standard of editorial design and proof‐reading generally.

Taking volume three first, there is the feel of an encyclopedia about it as the various sections unfold – first production (papermaking, type‐founding, binding, etc), then publishing/distribution/reading (Scott and Blackwood, bookselling and distribution, railway bookstalls and Menzies, religious books, libraries, Gaelic publishing and reading), then markets/genres (Waverley and authorship, Carlyle and Oliphant, defining the Scottish literary canon, diversity in print in various genres from religious to maps, popular science with Chambers and the SSPCK), and beyond Scotland (joint ventures with London, links with Wales and Ireland, the Scottish book in North America and India and beyond). Some offer insights beyond their ostensible content – the interdependence of dissemination and technology like stereotyping and lithography, using publishers' records for inferring and extrapolating wider practices in publishing, probing author's copyrights as an insight into publishing practice, defining a body of literature such as Scottish poetry as a “canon” (of historiographic importance), connecting popular/secular books and periodicals with literacy, and examining how far diasporic Scottishness was underpinned by publishing and vice versa. A competent index will help readers plumb themes such as these.

Taking volume four next, as compilers of The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, volume three (covering the period 1850‐2000) found as well, coming up to date presents its very own problems, not least of all those of critical distance. The style of volume four follows the sectional format of volume three – starting with infrastructure (up to 1980) (newspapers, bookselling and chains, the growing business‐like approach in publishing), production (some nice things on typography and book illustration), publishing policies (which in two stages pick up on literary culture like Kailyard to Muriel Spark, and then launch into diversity with snapshots of different aspects of Scottish publishing like reference and children's), and a section on authors and readers (rather a reprise by now of these, economics of authorship, Harry Potter and book festivals).

In the introduction the editors argue that the nineteenth‐century was a time of expansion and the twentieth a time of contraction and specialization. Elsewhere we read of fragmentation in Scottish publishing and bookselling. The final section considers the future of the book in Scotland, in a globalized context, with a brain drain, with financial challenges, many small companies with low recruitment opportunities, facing the hegemony of world‐wide companies and chains, faced with an enthusiastic but volatile readership and an uneven cultural polity post‐devolution. Indeed, the issues familiar to anyone who examines tourism, the arts, book publishing, and much else in any small but vigorously self‐defining national culture: in this respect Scotland has much in common with places like Norway and Iceland and Denmark. It is good to see a clear political sense in the fourth volume above all, and it comes through earlier where authors like Hugh DacDiarmid are discussed.

There is extensive – arguably disportionate – coverage of literary publishing from 1880‐1914, 1914‐1945 (this one discussing the literary renaissance) and 1945‐2000, reflecting how much easier it is to discuss authors (who say a lot, provide up‐front evidence, and about whom a lot is said) than dig deep into the financial and economic verities (the editors admit, page 457, that these are elusive) to infer trends. There are times too when a kind of jobbing approach to mere coverage reveals the challenges of providing much if not anything more than a mere digest of players and factors – pieces in volume three on science, reference, and education (but not maps) are like this, and pieces in volume four (like one called “selling to the world”) are clearly meant to whet the reader's appetite rather than provide representative information.

Volume four is full of case‐studies (on Scottish literary magazines, Naomi Mitchison, Canongate, T & T Clark, the EUP itself, Collins, Blackie, the Kelpies series, the Edinburgh Book Festival, the CD‐Romization of the Encyclopedia Britannica), and these are worth noting for lecturing and by students, and all can readily be recontextualized and updated by readers. I am particular enough to wonder just how much all these case‐studies were written and included with a close eye on the over‐arching theses that emerge about Scottish publishing – as reflected in both the titles (where there could be far more debate) and in comments like those in the final section of volume four. One contributor subtly observes that one of the difficulties of writing anything about Scottish books is knowing how and where to separate them out from UK (London‐based) books, and, pleasantly, with a bit of work connecting up the dots, readers can glean the start of a coherent picture of this. Cyberculture seems to be seen as an alien and perhaps twenty‐first century phenomenon, even though there is a case‐study about it, as something beyond the cut‐off date of 2000. Computer games get no look‐in.

For anyone familiar with the challenge of writing about local/national culture, it is often difficult to get that critical distance. For instance, Robert Crawford's recent history of Scottish literature seems to imply that little would have happened, or have been researched in recent years, without the existence of the University of St Andrews. In this history of the book, there is an understandable parochialism about some of the evidence – the reception of Scott, the marginalization of the Gaelic, the role of libraries and reading rooms, and, above all, presenting evidence as self‐evidently sufficient by merely looking through the lens of authors. Or else, claiming that professionalization exists by simply stating that it does (a case yet to be made) and that cultural vigour exists by simply reciting the work of lots of authors.

If there is a distinction between the two volumes it is perhaps that volume three provides the evidence while volume four makes claims and promises. This will almost certainly provoke debate, not least of all since the year 2000 is now nearly a decade past. Lead‐time to get a work as elaborate as this to the shelf will explain that, and the book makes a fine retrospective, but there is as much industry and ambition after 1880 as before it, if not more, and no small quantity of professional diversity before 1880. As Bowman's study of British librarianship and information work between 1991 and 2005 revealed too, large compilations tend to lose momentum on the ideas, getting lost in the descriptive detail. By the way, for librarians, there are several interesting essays on the history of libraries (mainly subscription).