In Enlightenment Edinburgh the world was increasinglygraspable. The findings from Captain Cook's globalexpeditions circulated from the Edinburgh bookshopin various forms from the 1770s onwards, disprovingthe existence of mythical lands and ascertaining theexistence of others. Scots were among those whocharted new parts of Australia, North America andcentral Africa in the decades that followed. Theworld map remained patchy and incomplete, reflectinga range of political, military and economicgeographies, and new and significant lacunae inknowledge seemed to continuously appear, but most ofthe globe had been described, mapped and in manycases colonised by European powers by the end of theso-called Age of Exploration. All the latestdiscoveries and descriptions were quicklyincorporated into widely accessible compilationtexts and atlases, such that a global overview cameeasily to hand.

In Edinburgh, it was an Age of Compilation. Thebooksellers sold thousands of items – geographicalgrammars and dictionaries, school textbooks,encyclopaedias, world maps and globes – purportingto present the world as a whole. These collectionsof world geography were necessarily the work ofdifferent kinds of compilers, including gentlemenscholars, hack editors, entrepreneurialprinter-publishers and technical specialists such asengravers. All had to process and choose betweensources in compiling an authoritative globalgeographical truth, and many essentially rearrangedinto a new material form the information that wasalready available from the bookshop. Thetwenty-volume WorldDisplayed, first sold in 1774 and withdifferent editions still circulating in the 1800s,was basically a compilation of travel accountsorganised by nation and region. The producers of thegrand twelve- and eighteen-inch globes copied thecontinental outlines from selected trustedcartographers. Even the three-inch pocket globesexplicitly noted their sources for certain features.The booksellers sold more than 100 world atlasesthat were similarly assembled from the work ofdifferent mapmakers. The expensive ‘Imperial SheetAtlas’, of which Bell & Bradfute sold six copiesbetween 1798 and 1809, was advertised as ‘compiledfrom the great French atlas, and others of the mostdistinguished geographers in Europe, forming thecompletest collection of single sheet maps hithertopublished and rendered particularly convenient byopening without folds’.