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Fox, Adam. The Press and the People: Cheap Print & Society in Scotland, 1500–1785. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. (electronic book)

Early modern book history in Scotland has focused primarily on the publication of texts by and for Scotland’s intellectual élite. Scotland eventually emerged, as it is often argued, as the most literate society in Europe at the time. Such an accomplishment is remarkable considering how relatively late the printing press was introduced in Scotland: Walter Chapman and Androw Myllar established the first press in 1507 at the instruction of James IV. Although cheap prints and popular literature were the “bread and butter” of Scottish printers in the early modern era, no study of their survival and impact on Scottish book trade had previously been published. Adam Fox’s The Press and the People fills this lacuna in an admirable manner, being the only large-scale survey of Scottish popular and ephemeral literature production to date.

Fox’s main goal is to create a survey of cheap print and popular literature in early modern Scotland, examining the relationships between increased book production and circulation and mass communication and popular culture (1). Part bibliographical study, part textual analysis, and part social history, The Press and People highlights the book as an agent for higher social inclusion and diversity in Scotland due to the low cost, as well as the portability of the material printed and sold. Fox’s erudite, judicious monograph is an authoritative bibliographical, sociocultural, and socioeconomic study of the subject.

Easily accessible print supported the increase in literacy in the kingdom as the Scottish Reformation of 1560 introduced new educational reforms that increased access to reading and writing instruction. According to Fox, three preconditions were necessary to create a literate society in Scotland: access to domestically printed literature; a book economy affordable to various social groups; and a public literate enough (at least in the vernacular) to buy and read cheap prints. These cheap prints were mostly broadsides, handbills, and pamphlets printed on poor-quality paper and sold unbound for rapid distribution. A healthy supply of vernacular popular literature printed in Scotland secured the emergence of Scots vernacular literature in print; the revival of the Scots language, was, as Fox argues, directly linked to “the social reach of cheap print” (8). Fox demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between domestic print production in the Scots language, a book trade focused on supplying cheap prints as its main business model, and the development of a literate public in Scotland across several social strata.

The book is divided into two parts. Part I: Establishing the Market describes the preconditions for the existence of a book publishing industry, as well as an avid reader base to support it. According to Fox, these preconditions were in place by 1560, the date of the Scottish Reformation, and 1760, the accession of George III (18). The first chapter provides an overview of both the emergence of a book trade and a literate public in Scotland; it includes an examination of printing outputs and prices, Scottish education, and average wages in Scotland in the early modern period. Chapters 2 and 3 explore Edinburgh’s book trade, with chapter 2 dedicated to the trade and vernacular literature between 1500 and 1660, and chapter 3 analyzing the trade and cheaper print production between 1660 and 1785. Chapter 4 examines the emergence of other print centers in Scotland—namely Aberdeen, Glasgow, and smaller burghs like St. Andrews and Dumfries—markets characterized by smaller outputs and low-quality prints. Printing in the small burghs occurred, Fox argues, not to compete with Edinburgh’s book trade, but to supply local readers with cheaper, affordable alternatives to the higher-quality books produced in the capital. Chapter 5 focuses on street literature; Fox contextualizes the symbiotic relationships between cheap print production, street literature, and the sellers who interacted directly with readers from all walks of life. By examining how geography, socio-economic class, book production and trade, and social history entwined to elucidate the importance of cheap print in Scotland, chapter 5 brings to life the characters and conditions that sustained book trade and printing production in early modern Scotland. It is, for this reviewer, the most accomplished chapter of an already highly accomplished book.

Part II examines the varieties of cheap print in terms of both format and genre. Chapter 6 is dedicated to analyzing the production of handbills and placards, including advertisements, notices, and elegies. Chapter 7, titled “Last Words and Dying Speeches,” includes analyses on the printing of last speeches and confessions from those who were publicly executed, which Fox argues “[. . .] shed [light] on the processes and rituals of public execution in early modern Scotland” (291). Chapter 8 explores the popular Scottish genre of ballads and songs—often published as broadsides—and sold by hawkers and ballad singers. Chapter 9 examines the production and popularity of almanacs and prognostications, one of the most affordable and read popular literature in Scotland. The popularity of prognostic literature was at odds with the Presbyterian establishment, creating tensions between the power and reach of the kirk and the seemingly superstitious literary interests of the populace. Finally, Chapter 10 examines little pamphlets and story books, a type of literature that edified audiences through entertainment.

Brimming with vivid details about the production of cheap print in Scotland, The Press and the People leaves no stone unturned when examining the extant evidence on early modern cheap print production in Scotland. Fox not only used source materials such as extant bibliographical evidence and records, but also consulted legal materials, such as town council and burgh records, testaments, and inventories that provide a richness of fiscal details. In these sources, Fox has found the voices of women printers and booksellers, whose role in the book trade was instrumental (13). Agnes Campbell, Lady Roseburn, for example, was a printing powerhouse, becoming Scotland’s most successful printer of the early modern period of any gender. She married printer Andrew Anderson—who became King’s Printer in 1671—and ran Anderson’s press as King’s Printer after his death in 1676. Fox credits Campbell with a prominent role in the expansion of book trade in Scotland, as well as the dominance of Edinburgh as Scotland’s printing production center in the eighteenth century. Campbell actively litigated against other printers to retain her role as the King’s Printer (until her death in 1716), and as printer to both the University of Edinburgh and to the city until 1708 (99). Other prominent women printers include Margaret Reid in Edinburgh, daughter of John Reid, junior; Catherine Norwell, wife of Thomas Bassandyne and later of Robert Smyth; Margaret Wallace, wife of Robert Charteris, once King’s Printer; Jonet Reid, wife of Andro Hart; and Margaret Cuthbert, widow to John Forbes, junior, who became Aberdeen’s first woman appointed town printer in 1705. The Press and the People highlights the stories of those women who became business partners—and business owners in their own right—and emphasizes how their successes contributed to propelling the Scottish book trade to greater strengths.

Similarly, this book reveals the fundamental roles that seemingly minor historical characters played in the establishment, and success, of popular literature and print in Scotland. Fox reveals how important caddies (porters who ran errands for a fee), and paper criers (boys who sold papers on the street) were in sustaining the book trade in Scotland, even when town and privy council records often depicted them as public nuisances, and as the subject of numerous public complaints. Towns and the public had a complex relationship with caddies. Despite numerous complaints against their behavior being filed to the Edinburgh Town Council in the eighteenth century, caddies were unequivocally trusted by locals and outsiders as a valuable, trusted resource for hire. Paper criers were also a familiar sight in Edinburgh—they sold papers and other ephemeral materials off the stationeries and printers directly to the public. The format and affordable prices of ephemera were perfectly suited for paper criers as a source of income. These young men often sold pamphlets, broadsheets, and other portable prints, and their itinerant business model contributed to the fast dissemination of cheap prints among the townsfolk. Often, printers distributed materials to paper criers before they stocked them at stationers. The names of some caddies and criers survive in records; for example, David Buttle was a crier from whom people could buy the Edinburgh Courant, or other newspapers, in the early eighteenth century. The Scottish book trade depended extensively on well-established networks of sale and distribution, of which paper criers became a crucial, trusted part.

Although the accessibility of Fox’s prose is undeniable, the abundance of details might limit the book’s audience, and can occasionally be challenging to follow. The impressive volume and breadth of the evidence that Fox incorporates in his monograph can feel overwhelming at times. Scholars will find that the electronic version of the book lacks a bibliography or list of references, despite the inclusion of endnotes in each chapter. This omission does reduce some of the value of having an electronic version of this book, especially as the author showed tremendous care in crafting thorough notes. However, these are mere quibbles compared to the caliber of the scholarship and prose found in Fox’s The Press and the People. This monograph is required reading for book historians of early modern Scotland specifically, and Britain and Europe in general. — Marian Toledo Candelaria, University of Virginia