8,264 records
Available as JSON
Up to 1850
The Scottish Book Trade Index (SBTI) is compiled and maintained by the National Library of Scotland. It lists the names, trades and addresses of people involved in printing in Scotland up to 1850, including printers, publishers, booksellers, bookbinders, printmakers, stationers, and papermakers.
The SBTI has its origins in the late 1970s from a request by the Eighteenth Century (now English) Short Title Catalogue that the National Library of Scotland should take responsibility for indexing the imprints of eighteenth-century Scottish books. The first step was the compilation of the National Library’s Imprint Index. Cards were systematically created for all members of the book trade who appear in eighteenth-century Scottish imprints by working through the Library’s catalogue, and afterwards many of the National Library’s eighteenth-century Scottish newspapers were read and relevant advertisements and news items again excerpted to cards. The National Library’s Imprint Index (referred to as NLS Impr Ind in the dataset) consists of cards, each of which contains a single piece of information, an entry from an imprint, an advertisement in a newspaper or other item. They are arranged under the names of the printer, bookseller, etc. and then in chronological order on index cards.
Afterwards, information from the directory of the book trade in H.G. Aldis, A List of Books Printed before 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, 1904,1970) has been added, and this has been supplemented by indexing the relevant publications of the Scottish Record Society. Covering the apprentices and burgesses of Edinburgh, the burgesses of Glasgow, the registration of wills for the whole of Scotland up to 1800, Edinburgh and Glasgow marriages, and those of Holyroodhouse and the Canongate Kirk in Edinburgh, and the burial registers of Greyfriars Kirkyard up to 1700, these offer a wide range of information about various members of the book trade.
The entries in the Scottish Book Trade Index summarise this information, giving the surname followed by the first name or names, the trade, and the name of the town or towns in which he or she worked. Alternative forms of the names are given in brackets. Members of the principal trades in papermaking, printing, bookselling, engraving and bookbinding are listed. Next the addresses are listed in chronological order with the inclusive dates for each address. Where an address is not known for particular dates the name of the town is repeated. In some entries there follows a section which gives biographical and trade information about the individual or firm, and this is followed by a section of references, indicating where the information indexed may be found. This is important because the index is intended only to offer a systematic overview of the information found, and to direct the researcher to further sources.
There is no imprint index available for 1801-1850, but the coverage of the directories is much stronger. Town directories appeared from 1773 for Edinburgh, from 1783 for Glasgow and at various later dates for other Scottish towns. The Edinburgh directories have now been indexed up to 1850, and the entries for members of the trade who were active in 1850 have been carried forward to 1900.
In 2015, the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) received a copy of the SBTI as a text file. The Data Conversion Group at Göttingen University parsed the text and added the information to the CERL Thesaurus: CERL Thesaurus. In 2016, the DCGL used the datamodel created for the Incunable Short Title Catalogue and populated it with the parsed SBTI data to make SBTI into an online searcheable database. It is hosted on the CERL website: SBTI (cerl.org).
The Scottish Book Trade Index is work-in-progress, and is updated when new book trade information comes to light.
Rights information
This data collection is made available as CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain.
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File contents: 1 readme file (plain text); 1 JSON file.
File size: 1.2 MB compressed (16.5 MB uncompressed)
Cite the data
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34812/p9yf-gm87
Dataset creator: National Library of Scotland
Dataset publisher: National Library of Scotland
Publication year: 2024
Suggested citation: National Library of Scotland. Scottish Book Trade Index. National Library of Scotland, 2024. https://doi.org/10.34812/p9yf-gm87