Throughout the nineteenth century Scotland was transformed from an agricultural nation on the periphery of Europe to become an industrial force with international significance. A landmark in its field, this volume explores the changes in the Scottish book trade as it moved from a small-scale manufacturing process to a mass-production industry. This book brings together the work of over thirty leading experts to explore a broad range of topics that include production technology, bookselling and distribution, the literary market, reading and libraries, and Scotland's international relations.

A Companion to Scottish Literature offers fresh readings of major authors and periods of Scottish literary production from the first millennium to the present. Bringing together contributions by many of the world’s leading experts in the field, this comprehensive resource provides the historical background of Scottish literature, highlights new critical approaches, and explores wider cultural and institutional contexts. Dealing with texts in the languages of Scots, English, and Gaelic, the Companion offers modern perspectives on the historical milieux, thematic contexts and canonical writers of Scottish literature. Original essays apply the most up-to-date critical and scholarly analyses to a uniquely wide range of topics, such as Gaelic literature, national and diasporic writing, children’s literature, Scottish drama and theatre, gender and sexuality, and women’s writing. Critical readings examine William Dunbar, Robert Burns, Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Muriel Spark and Carol Ann Duffy, amongst others. With full references and guidance for further reading, as well as numerous links to online resources, A Companion to Scottish Literature is essential reading for advanced students and scholars of Scottish literature, as well as academic and non-academic readers with an interest in the subject.

This collection of essays illustrates various pressures and concerns—both practical and theoretical—related to the study of print culture. Procedural difficulties range from doubts about the reliability of digitized resources to concerns with the limiting parameters of 'national' book history.

This volume focuses on the publisher's series as a cultural formation - a material artefact and component of cultural hierarchies. Contributors engage with archival research, cultural theory, literary and bibliometric analysis (amongst a range of other approaches) to contextualize the publisher's series in terms of its cultural and economic work.

Today, Scotland's history is frequently associated with the clarion call of political nationalism. However, in the nineteenth century the influence of history on Scottish national identity was far more ambiguous. How, then, did ideas about the past shape Scottish identity in a period when union with England was all but unquestioned? The activities of the antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798-1874) help us to address this question. Innes was a prolific editor of medieval and early modern documents relating to Scotland's parliament, legal system, burghs, universities, aristocratic families and pre-Reformation church. Yet unlike scholars today, he saw that editorial role in interventionist terms. His source editions were artificial constructs that powerfully articulated his worldview and agendas: emphasising Enlightenment-inspired narratives of social progress and institutional development. At the same time they used manuscript facsimiles and images of medieval architecture to foreground a romantic concern for the texture of past lives. Innes operated within an elite associational culture which gave him access to the leading intellectuals and politicians of the day. His representations of Scottish history therefore had significant influence and were put to work as commentaries on some of the major debates which exorcised Scotland's intelligentsia across the middle decades of the century. This analysis of Innes's work with sources, set within the intellectual context of the time and against the antiquarian activities of his contemporaries, provides a window onto the ways in which the 'national past' was perceived in Scotland during the nineteenth century. This allows us to explore how historical thinkers negotiated the apparent dichotomies between Enlightenment and Romanticism, whilst at the same time enabling a re-examination of prevailing assumptions about Scotland's supposed failure to maintain a viable national consciousness in the later 1800s.

The first thorough study of the book trade during the age of Fergusson and Burns.

Studies the book trade during the age of Fergusson and BurnsOver 40 leading scholars come together in this volume to scrutinise the development and impact of printing, binding, bookselling, libraries, textbooks, distribution and international trade, copyright, piracy, literacy, music publication, women readers, children's books and cookery books.The 18th 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.

A thorough account of newspaper and periodical press history in Britain and Ireland from 1800-1900Provides a comprehensive history of the British and Irish Press from 1800-1900, reflected upon in 60 substantive chapters and focused case studiesSets out to capture the cross-regional and transnational dimension of press history in nineteenth-century Britain and IrelandOffers unique and important reassessments of nineteenth-century British and Irish press and periodical media within social, cultural, technological, economic and historical contextsThis is a unique collection of essays examining nineteenth-century British and Irish newspaper and periodical history during a key period of change and development. It covers an important point of expansion in periodical and press history across the four nations of Great Britain (England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales), concentrating on cross-border and transnational comparisons and contrasts in nineteenth-century print communication. Designed to provide readers with a clear understanding of the current state of research in the field, in addition to an extensive introduction, it includes forty newly commissioned chapters and case studies exploring a full range of press activity and press genres during this intense period of change. Along with keystone chapters on the economics of the press and periodicals, production processes, readership and distribution networks, and legal frameworks under which the press operated, the book examines a wide range of areas from religious, literary, political and medical press genres to analyses of overseas and migr press and emerging developments in children's and women's press.

This volume brings together key documents covering technologies of production that affected the British publishing industry during a significant period of change. It focuses in particular on key source material related to industrialisation of print production, which saw major leaps forward as mechanised innovations increased the speed, efficiency and delivery of texts through the production process. The introduction of iron, steam and other forms of rotary power presses improved the output of the print room over the century. Alongside this came improvements in typesetting and associated tasks, with the adoption of linotype and monotype casting machines. Changes in available methods of reproducing illustrations such as the development of lithographic printing processes and, in the second half of the century, photographic processes such as half-tone and photogravure, enabled wider incorporation of illustrations into periodicals and books. Such technological changes also fed organisational changes within the print and publishing trade. National unions for the print trade were established in the middle of the century to adapt to new working conditions, and engaged in robust debates about technology and its effect in the workplace.

This book is a study of the print cultures of the four principal Celtic languages — Irish, Welsh, Gaelic and Breton — in the crucial period between 1700 and 1900. Over the past four centuries, the Celtic languages of northwest Europe have followed contrasting paths of maintenance and decline. This was despite their common lack of official recognition and use, and their common distance from the centres of political power. This volume analyses publishing, circulation and reading in the four languages, particularly at a popular level, showing the different levels of overall activity as well as the distinctions in the types of printed texts between regions. The approach is a broad one, considering all printed books down to very small cheap formats. It explores the interactions between the different regions and the continuation of print culture within diasporic communities. This volume will appeal to book historians, to scholars of the four languages and their literature, and to students of Celtic studies.