A Bookshop in a Global City

This book begins with a bookshop. To map thegeographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh, thefollowing chapters start with the records ofbooksellers based in the heart of the city. From aShort View of the SeveralNations of the World in November 1771 toa collection of Letters fromCanada in October 1809, more than 10,000geographical publications passed through that shopover nearly four decades. There were maps, atlases,encyclopaedias, school textbooks and globes. Therewere compilations of African discoveries andaccounts of Arctic voyages. Multi-volumedescriptions of British diplomatic missions to Chinawere sold alongside ninety-nine-page pamphlets onScotland's Gaelic-speaking western isles. Thebooksellers stocked histories of Minorca, Morocco,Mauritius and Mexico, all illustrated with maps.City plans of London, Copenhagen, Boston and NewYork passed through the shop, plus surveys ofTurkey, Pennsylvania, Perthshire and Palau. Touristguides to Loch Lomond, Bath and Paris were on theshelves next to strip-map books of Scottish andIrish roads. There were estate plans, village mapsand parish reports. There were mapmaking manuals andinstructional texts for using sextants andquadrants. Customers could subscribe to suchperiodicals as AsiaticResearches and TheGeographical Magazine. And there werehundreds of cheap geographical dictionaries,grammars and gazetteers, each with a few pages or afew lines on every nation and region of the knownworld, making the world known to readers inEdinburgh.

As well as recording what was traded, the booksellerslisted more than 2,000 different buyers ofgeographical publications. Among the bookshop'scustomers were Lowland lending libraries, Highlandlanded gentry, students of law and medicine, Englishtourists, women's boarding school teachers,secretaries of scientific societies and owners ofWest Indian sugar plantations. There werearchitects, army men, bankers, barbers, builders,church ministers, drapers, farmers, jewellers,lawyers, mathematicians, Members of Parliament,milliners, musicians, opticians, painters, papermill owners, philosophers, poets, publicprosecutors, sailors, schoolmasters, stablers,surgeons, tailors, trunk makers, upholsterers andwine merchants. Barons and baronets bought geographybooks, along with colonels, countesses, misses,esquires, lords, ladies and lieutenants, plus twosignors and a monsieur. Most were based at Edinburghaddresses, but other customers came from places likeShetland, Leadhills and Aberdeen; London, Sheffieldand Belfast; and Stockholm, Hamburg andPhiladelphia.