Scottish Types

Citation

Williams K (2026) Scottish Types. In: Green D, Mann AJ, Marshall J & Wingfield E (eds.) History of the Book in Scotland, Volume I, Part One. Edinburgh University Press. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-edinburgh-history-of-the-book-in-scotland-volume-1-part-i.html

Abstract
First paragraph; Scottish typography - embracing in its fullest sense the types and other printing materials or plant used, the stylistic choices made by compositors and pressmen, and the evolving mise-en-page (page design) of the Scottish book - has attracted little study and less analysis. It is deserving of both. For the first two hundred years of its domestic print history, Scotland had no native letter foundries; all of its types were produced, as the expression goes, ‘furth of the realm’. The first Scottish founder was Peter Rae at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Stewart 1906; Shirley 1914). He was followed by James Duncan, active in Glasgow by 1718 (Ferguson 1889, 7-8), but the first major Scottish typefounder was Alexander Wilson who did not set up shop until 1742, firstly in St Andrews and then at Camlackie near Glasgow in 1744 (Reed 1952, 257-266;SBTI). Accordingly, a study of Scottish typography is fundamentally a study of Scottish printers’ interactions with their French, Dutch, and English neighbours. This is even more true of the evolving styles and forms of the Scottish book which, like any European printing tradition, developed in concert with the printing traditions of neighbouring cultures. Scotland, as will be seen, gradually shifted its typographical allegiance from a French, especially northern French, cultural ambit at the beginning of the sixteenth century to its Dutch equivalent by the end of the seventeenth century, maintaining throughout close but often far from straightforward interactions with the much larger English print trade to the south. What follows is a map of Scottish typography and its evolution from the first pages printed on Chepman and Myllar’s press in 1508 to around the 1707 Act of Union. It begins with the importation and use of types and what they can tell us about the earliest Scottish printers before addressing Scottish typographical idiosyncracies and the varied fortunes of printing in the country during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Within a printing landscape dominated by the much larger printing centres to the south and east, Scottish typography maintained distinctive features, tied to a distinctive institutional history, throughout this period.