Download e-book for kindle: The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their by Richard B. Sher

The overdue eighteenth century witnessed an explosion of highbrow job in Scotland via such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Hugh Blair, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, James Boswell, and Robert Burns. And the books written by means of those seminal thinkers made an important mark in the course of their time in nearly each box of well mannered literature and better studying all through Britain, Europe, and the Americas. 

In this magisterial background, Richard B. Sher breaks new flooring for our realizing of the Enlightenment and the forgotten function of publishing in the course of that interval. The Enlightenment and the Book seeks to therapy the typical misperception that such classics as The Wealth of Nations and The lifetime of Samuel Johnson have been written through authors who eyed their publishers as minor functionaries of their career. on the contrary, Sher exhibits how the method of bookmaking through the overdue eighteenth-century concerned a deeply advanced partnership among authors and their publishers, one within which writers observed the booklet not just as pivotal within the dissemination in their rules, but in addition as an important to their goals of repute and financial achieve. equally, Sher demonstrates that publishers have been serious about the undertaking of bookmaking with the intention to improve human wisdom in addition to to acquire profits. 

The Enlightenment and the Book explores this stress among creativity and trade that also exists in scholarly publishing this day. Lavishly illustrated and skillfully conceived, it will likely be needs to examining for somebody attracted to the background of the ebook or the construction and diffusion of Enlightenment thought.