As much as any scholar could wish, the authorship of Robert Burns (1759–96) presents problems in textual editing and book history: uncertain attributions, bibliographical conundrums, egregious editorial interference and lost manuscripts to say nothing of a large dose of fraudulence and forgery. Providing a complete edition of Burns's works across poetry, prose and song, to consistently high standards of editorial practice and archival retrieval, has only recently begun, more than 250 years after the writer's birth. That editorial project is examining materials that have remained surprisingly occlusive, manuscripts and books that would (one cannot help feeling) have been pored over by generation after generation of scholars if they had pertained to Burns's Romantic near contemporaries, for instance, Wordsworth or Coleridge. One of the most important association print copies of Burns presents an instructive case here. It highlights the fragile and complex transmission of the Burns canon as well as the vexed cultural politics which have attached to Scotland's national bard – all the more so since his death. This is a four-volume interleaved set of The Scots Musical Museum (1787–92) in which Burns provided additional material to the original publication and that eventually he gifted to Captain Robert Riddell (1755–94).

From 1787 Robert Burns began collecting song material to contribute to James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum. Already enjoying his first flush of fame as a poet, Burns now embarked on a project that would become one of the main channels to his achievement as a song writer, indeed Scotland’s greatest one. Received wisdom has it that he contributed around 150 of his own compositions to the Museum (these six volumes appearing between 1787 and 1803) as well as collecting, sometimes ‘repairing’, at least another fifty texts for the publication, becoming ‘de facto editor’.