The pivotal role of booksellers and publishers in the presentation and spread of Enlightenment ideas has never attracted the sort of attention bestowed upon the authors of the day, such as David Hume, Adam Smith, William Godwin, and Edward Gibbon, but Richard Sher, Distinguished Professor of History at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, has redressed this imbalance admirably in The Enlightenment and the Book. According to Sher, the contributions that Andrew Millar, Thomas Cadell, William Creech, Andrew Strahan, and others made to the book trade in the eighteenth century were responsible for shepherding Enlightenment works into print and thus into posterity. The relationships these men forged with the writers whose work they published were much more complex and collaborative than strictly commercial, so the omission of attention to their contributions has left an important aspect of Enlightenment history in the dark.

Sher describes the Enlightenment as “a grand symphony with multiple variations” (15) rather than as a single intellectual entity, addressing the arguments by scholars who have claimed that the Scottish Enlightenment did or did not exist apart from the British Enlightenment. Sher argues that as one of these variations, the Scottish Enlightenment, with its inclusion of works in many formats, genres, and fields, made a disproportionately large impact upon the literary culture of the era, arising as it did from a group of literati who knew each other personally or were related by blood or marriage and thus made up a cohesive, if widespread, circle. Ultimately, many of the books written by Scottish authors and published in Edinburgh or London were reprinted in Dublin or Philadelphia in cheaper editions, and it was these inexpensive versions that dispersed Enlightenment ideas throughout the citizenry of the new United States.

Scottish authors confronted a number of obstacles in making themselves known beyond Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. One of these obstacles was the competition with English authors like Samuel Johnson or Horace Walpole, who made disparaging remarks in public about Scotland and the Scots and gave their Scottish counterparts reason to worry that their works would be condemned without regard to merit. Some of the Scots attempted to hide their national origins by changing their surnames to something more English, while some responded in the opposite direction and incorporated more nationalist overtones into their works as though to trumpet Scotland's heightened position as a center of literary achievement and so thumb their noses at the scoffers in London.

The route to fame and literary fortune remained thorny for all authors, though, and so a competent, loyal, and imaginative publisher was a valuable ally. Johnson's Dictionary, written in 1745–55, is an example of a work that was supported and steered through production by Robert Dodsley, as well as by Millar and Strahan, who were also publishers of the works of many other Enlightenment authors. Sher points out that these booksellers and publishers were the new patrons of literature, replacing aristocratic patronage with a sort of relationship that provided indirect support, freed authors from the capricious purse strings of the highborn, and enabled authors to depend upon the appeal of their works to the reading public. Still, most Scottish writers continued to depend upon powerful and well-placed patrons of one variety or another for their primary incomes, holding sinecures or appointments as academics, clergymen, or judges and supporting their writing by those means.

Sher includes in his work some fascinating information on the calculations by which authors were paid for their books. Whether paid by the page or by the job, whether the authors sold their copyrights before publication or after, arranged for subscriptions to their works, or shared profits with their publishers, Scottish writers were among the best-paid for their work in the eighteenth century. James Boswell's first edition of Life of Johnson, published in May 1791, earned its author the sizable sum of more than £1,500, though expenses reduced this amount to little more than £600. Using documents from the Boswell papers at Yale University, Sher demonstrates the calculations of Boswell's publisher and printer, Charles Dilly and Henry Baldwin, respectively, to reach those figures, including the sum of £47 5s. paid to the engraver for the portrait of Johnson that adorned the frontispiece.

Publishers also invested in high-risk large-scale projects like dictionaries, geographies, and encyclopedias, works that would not have been undertaken otherwise. Sher brings to life several of the publishers whose names will be most familiar to historians and readers of Enlightenment works, including Millar, Strahan, and Cadell, discussing their reputations among authors and their contributions to the “London-Edinburgh Publishing Axis.” According to Sher, these men turned the Scottish bookselling industry into the Scottish Enlightenment, dominating publishing in this field until late in the eighteenth century and raising the status of the authors whose works they produced.

Among the strengths of Sher's book are an excellent array of illustrations and portraits, plus a treasure trove of appendices, which comprise tables listing Scottish Enlightenment authors; first editions of books written by Scots but published in England, Ireland, or America; indexes of publishers; and an intriguing table entitled “Subjects and Formats of First British Editions of Scottish Enlightenment Books,” which identifies the numbers of books in each field published as folio, quarto, octavo, or duodecimo in size (700). Sher has also provided an exhaustive bibliography, which will prove a gold mine of resources for readers who are interested in the Enlightenment's book trade and literary culture or who find their curiosity about eighteenth-century literary figures piqued by this work. The Enlightenment and the Book is a fascinating and valuable contribution to Enlightenment studies and the history of the book trade.