The Glasgow Enlightenment is widely regarded as the first book to explore the nature and accomplishments of the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Glasgow in a comprehensive manner. In addition to a general introduction by the editors, there are seven chapters devoted to Glasgow University professors, such as Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, John Millar, William Leechman, and John Anderson. At a time when the Glasgow economy was booming in the strength of its trade with America, these and other Glasgow men of science and learning were making major contributions to the European world of philosophy, law, political economy, natural philosophy, medicine, and religious toleration. There are also five chapters on other individuals and topics, including the physician and author John Moore, James Boswell during his student days, images of Glasgow in popular poetry, and Popular party clergymen who challenged the dominant views of the academic Enlightenment with an alternative vision of liberty and piety. This edition features a new bibliographical preface by Richard B. Sher that discusses the substantial secondary literature on eighteenth-century Glasgow and the Glasgow Enlightenment since the original publication of this book more than a quarter of a century ago.

This Element throws new light on James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson by investigating its early publication history. Despite precarious psychological and financial circumstances and other limitations, Boswell was both author and publisher of the two-volume quarto edition that appeared in 1791. This study utilizes little-known documents to explore the details and implications of Boswell's risky undertaking. It argues that the success of the first edition was the result not only of Boswell's biographical genius but also of collaboration with a devoted support network, including the bookseller Charles Dilly, the printer Henry Baldwin and his employees, several newspaper and magazine editors, Boswell's 'Gang' (Edmond Malone, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and John Courtenay) and other members of The Club, and Sir William Forbes. Although the muddled second edition (1793) suffered from Boswell's increasing dysfunction in the years before his death in 1795, the resilient Boswellian network subsequently secured the book's exalted reputation.

This volume, tenth in the Yale Boswell Editions Research Series of correspondence, collects the letters exchanged between James Boswell (1740-1795) and Sir William Forbes of Pitsligo (1739-1806), eminent banker, civic improver, philanthropist, literary and cultural patron, and lay leader of Edinburgh's 'English Episcopal' community. Forbes served Boswell as his most valued Scottish advisor, an affectionate and admired counsellor to whom he would often turn for personal, financial, moral, and religious guidance, and whom he would name executor of his estate and co-guardian of his children. Their friendship probably began in 1759 as new members of the same Masonic lodge in Edinburgh, and it deepened over time, and included their families. Boswell shared with Forbes significant portions of his private journal, and discussed with him his authorial ambitions as he developed the innovative biographical technique that would characterize his major publications on Samuel Johnson. He sought Forbes's opinions about his original 1773 account of what would become his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, with Samuel Johnson (1785), and about his journal of his 1777 visit with Johnson at Ashbourne, later used in The Life of Samuel Johnson (1791). Boswell, in turn, broadened and enriched Forbes's social range, providing a gateway into his remarkable circle of friends in London, in particular the members of the 'Literary Club'. As Richard B. Sher explains in his introduction, none of Boswell's other close friends straddled Boswell's various worlds--his family life and professional career in Edinburgh, his lairdship of the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, his literary life in London--in this way. The volume, while thoroughly documenting the friendship that lies at its core, also illuminates the lives of Boswell and Forbes individually, especially Boswell's final decade in London. It publishes a total of 111 comprehensively annotated letters, few of which have appeared previously in print: 79 exchanged between Forbes and Boswell between 1772 and 1794, and 32 involving other correspondents. The edition draws extensively on unpublished manuscripts in both the Boswell Collection at Yale and the Fettercairn Papers in the National Library of Scotland, including revealing letters from Forbes to his beloved wife 'Betsy', Lady Forbes, and to his close friend James Beattie, who would become Forbes's own biographical subject in the decade after Boswell's death.

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas.
In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. "The Enlightenment and the Book" seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Life of Samuel Johnson" were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits.
"The Enlightenment and the Book" explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.

The late eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of intellectual activity in Scotland by such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by these seminal thinkers made a significant mark during their time in almost every field of polite literature and higher learning throughout Britain, Europe, and the Americas.
In this magisterial history, Richard B. Sher breaks new ground for our understanding of the Enlightenment and the forgotten role of publishing during that period. "The Enlightenment and the Book" seeks to remedy the common misperception that such classics as "The Wealth of Nations" and "The Life of Samuel Johnson" were written by authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries in their profession. To the contrary, Sher shows how the process of bookmaking during the late eighteenth-century involved a deeply complex partnership between authors and their publishers, one in which writers saw the book industry not only as pivotal in the dissemination of their ideas, but also as crucial to their dreams of fame and monetary gain. Similarly, Sher demonstrates that publishers were involved in the project of bookmaking in order to advance human knowledge as well as to accumulate profits.
"The Enlightenment and the Book" explores this tension between creativity and commerce that still exists in scholarly publishing today. Lavishly illustrated and elegantly conceived, it will be must reading for anyone interested in the history of the book or the production and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.