Scholarly Book Collecting in Restoration Scotland: The Library of the Revd James Nairn (1629–1678). By Murray C. T. Simpson

The study of private book ownership in England in the seventeenth century has seen great leaps forward in the past decade, culminating in David Pearson’s 2018 Lyell Lectures Book Ownership in Stuart England, reviewed above. However, private book ownership in early modern Scotland has not been serviced by the same level of detailed case studies or sweeping overviews of its southern neighbour. Murray Simpson’s Scholarly Book Collecting in Restoration Scotland, then, is a welcome addition to our growing understanding of the bibliographical landscape of a country which was quickly developing in economic and academic prowess but in the midst of ongoing civil wars and religious disputes.

Simpson, former Special Collections Librarian at the University of Edinburgh, focuses his study on one of his predecessors, the Rev’d James Nairn, who, amongst many other things, briefly held the office of librarian to the same university in 1652–53. Nairn, who matriculated at the University in 1646, amassed what was quantifiably one of the largest private collections in Scotland of his time during a relatively short life. Nairn’s university career was surely marked by plague, civil war, and fervent religious debate; but it was also marked by the University at the height of the Scottish regenting system and a growing wealth of books to be found in private and institutional collections. After his brief stint as a librarian, Nairn’s career as a minister saw a rapid ascent with an appointment to the parish of Canongate as second minister in 1656, perhaps the wealthiest and best-known parish in the city, which came with a commensurate salary. Flush with funds and fresh out of university, Nairn set to work amassing his book collection over the next twenty years as he moved from city to coastal village parishes. Nairn’s bequest of his book collection to his university, numbering nearly 1850 titles, would expand the University’s library by nearly a third (p. 3), and the University wouldn’t see a book donation of similar size until the nineteenth century.

The main focus of this work is to bring the published catalogue of Nairn’s library, which was printed in the year of his death on the occasion of the collection being given to the University of Edinburgh, up to modern bibliographic standards. The small quarto catalogue which was printed in 1678 by Thomas Brown (ESTC R223843) is very much a short title catalogue of its time, leaving a certain level of ambiguity for exact edition identification. Simpson’s updating and expansion of this catalogue constitutes Part 2 of this book (pp. 109–307) and includes name authorities, expanded imprints, union bibliography numbers (ESTC and USTC), nature of tract volumes, modern pressmarks, and provenance information.

The preface to the catalogue, however, is where the real gems lie in Simpson’s work. Part 1 of this book is divided into three distinct sections: a biography of Nairn, a subject analysis of his book collection, and a survey of the book markets and contemporary book collectors in Scotland during Nairn’s life. Tracing the life of a parish minister in Scotland in the seventeenth century, especially one who leaves the city for a quieter life, is no small task, but Simpson’s Introduction and Life (pp. 11–28) is well-referenced and approaches its topic from every possible vantage point. The bibliographical landscape that Nairn found himself in is bifurcated, possibly to the detriment of the overall effect, by separating the chapters on how Nairn acquired his books (Chapter 3) and other clerical book collectors (Chapter 8). The insertion of four chapters of subject analysis and statistical survey of Nairn’s books are useful in their survey and detail, but would have been better placed after the biographical and bibliographical work and the catalogue. Nonetheless, Simpson’s most exciting chapter is his eighth, ‘Other Clerical Book Collectors in Restoration Scotland’, where Nairn is placed in the deeper context of other known book owners, both urban and rural. Here we see the veil over the bookish landscape of Restoration Scotland start to be fully pulled back by Simpson, moving from Dunblane to Aberdeen, to St Andrews and back to the capital at break-neck speed. The well-referenced nature of this survey, pointing us to a small but important manuscript evidence-base, leaves much open for future scholarship.

Simpson’s lifelong study of Nairn is known to many working on Scottish book history, and this publication is a reworking and development of his 1988 University of Edinburgh doctoral thesis, which was converted to a finding aid in 1990 found on the shelves of the University’s special collections reading room. It is fortuitous, then, that the editors of the Library of the Written Word convinced Simpson to revisit his subject and bring not only Nairn, but also his bibliographic world, to light. Simpson’s revelry in his forty-year study of his subject spans the evolution of the information age, taking in the shift from a University Library catalogue in sheaf and loose-leaf binder form in the early 1980s, to the nascent computer catalogues, and the evolution to the modern online successors (p. 2). However, his work was not always aided by modern catalogues, finding errors in transcription and details lost in subsequent data migrations and collection moves.

Like many other volumes in the series, Scholarly Book Collecting in Restoration Scotland has detailed union catalogue references, a rich bibliography, and offers a clear and open window into a corner of book history which is often overlooked. The volume suffers from the lack of any illustrations (e.g. having a sample of inscriptions on volumes would help in the pursuit of those stray individual Nairn books which may turn up in other collections), but is buoyed by provenance, subject, and general indexes which add to the utility of both the edited catalogue and Simpson’s excellent biographical, subject, and bibliographical sketches.