
In January 1906 the Treasurer of the Society of Writers to His Majesty’s Signet, John Cowan, wrote a letter to Barbara Edmond: “It was with deep regret that I heard of Mr. Edmond’s death. It must have been very sudden at the end as I understood that he was going on quite favourably..” Edmond had suffered a small cut to his neck from his shirt collar, infection had set in and then a sudden, fatal fever. It was a rushed, tragic and senseless end for a great bibliographic scholar only newly arrived into the Librarianship of the Signet Library where he could have expected to enjoy his most fruitful years. Barbara Edmond would receive a gift of 100 guineas from the Society, and the Society received the gift of the printing blocks for one of her husband’s greatest works of scholarship, The Annals of Scottish Printing.
That he was at the Signet Library at all was an extraordinary achievement. John Philip Edmond was a scion of Aberdonian trade, born in 1850 and apprenticed to his father’s bookbinding and printing enterprise. He’d inherit the firm on his father’s death in 1876 and would only relinquish it in 1888, when he was already arguably entering middle age. The path from craft labour in a workshop in the north east of Scotland to the Signet Library’s grand halls might seem a steep one, but there is no hint that Edmond held his background in scorn nor felt disadvantaged by it. In 1883 he began the instinctive and lifelong friendship with James Lindsay, Earl of Balcarres that would shape both of their lives, and in the same year self-published the first of the long series of scholarly bibliographic studies that would make his name.
Nor was the Signet Library quite the patrician, closed-off professional affair that one would perhaps expect of an institution built by Georgian and Victorian lawyers. Their librarianship appointments were imaginative ones and grew into lengthy relationships – Edmond’s predecessors served 32 years, 41 years and 25 years respectively. Thomas Graves Law arrived in 1879 on the back of a traumatic breach with a Roman Catholic Church that would pursue him even within the Library itself right up until his death. David Laing was a brilliant bibliographer and historian, but Regency Edinburgh’s world of learning was less open to talented interlopers from trade historian than their Georgian forefathers and in taking him on the Signet Library had gone out on a limb. Where Laing had chafed against the intense collegiality of the Writers to the Signet, Edmond had instinctively understood and responded to it, and the Writers to the Signet, whose work though well-remunerated was often nonetheless an unremitting grind, recognised a fellow soldier in the committed, Stakhanovite Edmond.
John Philip Edmond was born in Aberdeen in 1850 and apprenticed to his father, a successful bookbinder and printer. In 1872 he married and was made a partner in the business, which he inherited on his father’s death in 1876.
In 1882 he sent his father’s library to auction, and the catalogue (8 copies of which Edmond had printed on Whatmore paper) affords a window into the atmosphere of his upbringing. The sale contained 759 lots, which consisted overwhelmingly of books published and bought new during his father’s lifetime. The emphasis is on Protestant religion, the literature of voyages and travel, and on the history of Aberdeen (this latter a superb collection which Edmond must have been loath to relinquish) including a complete set of the publications of the Spalding Society. The books are almost entirely in the English language, with only a handful of examples in French and Latin. s brought together to support keen outside interests and passions. It’s not a bibliophilic collection: these are books acquired to support outside interests and commitments and do not appear to have been acquired for their own sake. But there are standouts – Henry Stephen’s Herodotus of 1566, a Foulis Paradise Lost from 1750, the 1683 Memoires of Sir James Melvil and a set of the works of “Peter Parley” (George Mogridge 1787-1854) in its own mahogany case. Most lots went for shillings or even pence. The exception to this is the most surprising lot – a volume of cloth samples collected during the voyages of James Cook, which achieved £4 17s 6d, but the sale overall raised the modern equivalent of £70,000. The purpose of the sale remains unknown, but it immediately preceded the publication of Edmond’s string of works on the early Aberdeen printers and may have been in part a fundraiser for them.
Edmond inherited his father’s active religious commitment, in a peculiarly Aberdonian fashion. The north east of Scotland had been home to a substantial recusant community even during the dangerous years of the late seventeenth century, from which was drawn many of the great thinkers and writers for what Dr. Kelsey Jackson Williams has termed “The First Scottish Enlightenment. A century later, John Phillip Edmond came into adulthood as a committed supporter of the Catholic-adjacent Oxford Movement led by John Henry Newman, joining the Guild of St. Alban the Martyr in 1879 and indeed giving his first son the middle name “Keble” after the Oxford Movement hero John Keble.
The Annual General Meeting of the Library Association for 1882 took place in Cambridge. A stocky bearded figure appears at top right in the group photograph: John Philip Edmond of Aberdeen, making his first public ventures into the world of librarianship and book scholarship. At the time, he was engaged in the research that would lead to his four self-published works that combined into The Aberdeen Printers: Edward Raban to James Nicol 1620-1736 (1884-1886) and he had written to James Lindsay, Earl Crawford, news of whose booklists from the vast collections of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana at Haigh Hall near Wigan had reached him. Lindsay responded with generosity, and when the Library Association met at Liverpool the following year Lindsay issued an invitation both to the assembled librarians and more particularly to Edmond to stay with him at Haigh and assist with the visit.
The two men seem to have recognised one another immediately, and there is no sense that the gulf of wealth and social status that nominally stood between them had any effect at all on their friendship. “We get on admirably together“ Edmond wrote from Haigh, “and are scarcely ever separated. Our tastes and hobbies are alike so that there is always the inexhaustible topic of books”. The following day he added “I did not go to bed until two this morning. We got amongst a lot of Scottish tracts and the search got quite exciting. You would have been amused to have seen us each with a candle in the gloomy passages. Sometimes Lord C. on the top rung of a ladder and I at the foot keeping it from slipping. One great prize we found. Three beautiful uncut Rabans!”
After the Liverpool visit, the lives of Lindsay and Edmond would remain intertwined for the rest of their lives. In 1885, Lindsay contributed to the exhibition Edmond organised for the British Association’s visit to Aberdeen. Meanwhile Edmond had already begun printing editions of early texts, most notably Cock Lorelles bote : a satirical poem in 1884, and in 1886 Edmond would be central to the launch of the New Spalding Club (an intellectual society publishing editions of historical works connected to the north east and Highlands of Scotland).
In 1888 John Philip Edmond wound up his two decades as a bookbinder and moved to London to take up the role of Deputy Librarian at Sion College, a High Church seminary for Anglican ministers. For a man with Edmond’s appetite for work, the role was relatively undemanding, and before long he had taken over an entire publishing project of Lindsay’s, the Catalogue of Ballads from the Bibliotheca Lindesiana, which Edmond edited and saw through the press (specifically, the University of Aberdeen Press, at Edmond’s recommendation). The Catalogue was published in late 1890, following which Edmond took charge of Lindsay’s Handlist of Proclamations.
Edmond was now embarking on his golden age. He took on an additional role as the Librarian and Assistant Secretary of the Alpine Club, and began work on his great work Annals of Scottish Printing which incorporated research by Dr. Robert Dickson alongside his own. In 1890, Lindsay brought Edmond to his family’s ancient seat at Balcarres, which he was reopening, to catalogue the library there.
Annals of Scottish Printing covers the period 1507-1601, with Dickson’s research covering the first half. It was a substantial project: in 1928 the Secretary to the British Library and President of the Library Association Arundell Esdaile would describe it as “the standard book on early Scottish printers” and declared that “all later work is ultimately a development from (Edmond and Dickson’s) foundation.”
The book comprises 38 chapters, each devoted to a particular printer or printing press. It is particularly notable for its wealth of illustrative examples of printed pages, printers’ marks and typeface examples, all painstakingly created from original copies. With no surviving copies of the work of Scotland’s pioneering printing partnership Chepman and Myllar surviving outwith the National Library of Scotland, the samples of their output included by Edmond in Annals of Scottish Printing took on especial importance as prior to the National Library of Scotland’s “First Scottish Books” digitization project no other reasonable means existed for scholars to view their work.
Walter Chepman is one of a number of early Writers to the Signet whose membership predates the opening of the Society’s first minute book in 1594, and evidence for his involvement with the Writers to the Signet is drawn from records of the Scottish Privy Council. This link between the Writers to the Signet and the arrival of the printing press in Scotland is a precious one for the Society, and in the absence of any actual Chepman works in the Signet Library collections, Edmond’s facsimile printing blocks for Annals of Scottish Printing become Chepman’s memorial here.
In 1891 John Philip Edmond signed a contract with Lindsay that brought him to Haigh Hall on a full-time basis. From this point on his output would take the form of catalogues of collections at Haigh Hall. Some of these would take Edmond beyond the Roman alphabet: in his application letter to the Signet Library, he reported “Of Oriental tongues I acquired sufficient proficiency in Chinese and Japanese to enable me to compile the catalogues of books in those languages.” It was of course the tip of the iceberg: “I have a knowledge”, he added, “of Latin, Greek, French, German and Italian, besides a more restricted acquaintance with almost every European language, including some of the Sclavonic group.”
Perhaps the most successful of these were two which straddled the end of the nineteenth century. The 1901 Catalogue of English Newspapers 1641 to 1666 cleared a path through one of the thickest and most intimidating of bibliographical jungles; the 1898 Catalogue of English Broadsides 1505-1897 was unique in its field for depth and breadth of coverage and untangling of previously unintelligible printing histories; it was reprinted in 1968 and is still useful today.
But there are hints that Edmond’s time at Haigh was not a happy one. Although Edmond was given a large house for his family rent-free, wide opportunities for travel, and although Lindsay supported the education of Edmond’s children, Haigh was isolated and the climate difficult for the overworking, delicate Edmond. Lindsay, whose own health now kept him away from Haigh for large parts of the year, had sold a collection of manuscripts to Enriqueta Rylands (founder of the John Rylands Library in Manchester) which had a disillusioning effect on Edmond. All this was compounded by personal tragedy: by 1903, four of his children had predeceased him. With this stage of his career having begun relatively late, he had little by way of savings and began to worry about what would happen to his surviving family should anything happen to him. Late in the year, his application for the post of Librarian to the House of Lords was unsuccessful: he had come second out of eighty applicants.
Early in 1904, a new vacancy arose: that of Librarian to the Signet Library. For his application, Edmond obtained permission from his previous referees to reuse their testimonials, but needed a letter from Lindsay who was at that moment sailing across the Atlantic. A telegraph caught Lindsay briefly ashore at Bermuda and a generous letter of recommendation swiftly followed.
Edmond’s testimonials are a Who’s Who of the greats of late Victorian European librarianship, with recommendations from the National Librarian of France, Bodley’s Librarian, the Librarian of the University Library of Cambridge, Henry Guppy of John Rylands Library in Manchester and many more. In retrospect his appointment to the Signet Library post seems obvious: of the final three candidates, he was the youngest and had by far the greatest intellectual and bibliographical pedigree. His closest rivals were David Hay Fleming, the scholar with private means whose bequest would create the Hay Fleming Library at the University of St. Andrews, and Dr. James Morison, who would eventually find his berth a decade later at the Indian Institute at Oxford.
But with an institution as collegiate as the Society of Writers to the Signet, personal relationships were considered of the highest importance and the success of Edmond’s stringent round of interviews (he had to meet every one of the twenty-one recruitment committee members) was almost certainly the decisive factor. The warmth with which he was received remained with him for the whole of his brief time at the Signet Library.
Although it was cut short by his tragic and untimely death, his time at the Signet Library and in Edinburgh more generally was anything but insignificant. Edmond was quickly elected as an ordinary member of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society, to whose publications he had already contributed. Almost immediately afterwards, he was elected President and had time left to him to make a quite crucial Presidential address which resulted in the 1913 List of Fifteenth Century Books in Edinburgh Libraries. At his death Edmond left the Signet Library with an entirely new catalogue of its fifteenth century books, including details of provenance and in the case of Boniface VIII’s Liber Sextus Decretalium (Peter Schoeffer 1473) the revelation that it had been signed by its illuminator, Ludovicus Ravenscot.
The story of the arrival of the Signet Library’s incunabula as they existed in 1905 is mysterious: it is plain that most of the 121 incunabula in Edmond’s catalogue had been kept separate and uncatalogued by the Signet Library’s librarian of the Victorian era, David Laing (and the possibility that they originated with Laing’s own collection cannot be ruled out: Laing was a chaotic figure and mixed his own property with that of the Library to an extent that proved impossible to unravel after his death). Unfortunately of the 121, only one now remains at the Library following the sales of 1960.
Another Laing inheritance that came to bear during Edmond’s time at the Signet Library was the issue of an early work on Scottish agriculture, James Donaldson’s Husbandry Anatomized” of 1697. Laing’s Library Catalogue of 1870 lists an edition of 1696, and noticing this, H. G. Aldis (then working on his eponymous List of books printed in Scotland before 1701) wrote from Cambridge querying the imprint. Edmond’s letter to George P. Johnston of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society records that he believed the 1696 imprint to be an error or a fake – but he may have omitted to inform Aldis of this, as the 1696 ghost edition remains on ESTC to this day and is regularly mentioned in the catalogues. The book itself does not appear to have survived on the Signet Library shelves into Edmond’s time, and the presence of two copies of this exceptionally rare work in David Laing’s auction catalogue may be enough to explain its fate.
Edmond’s predecessor, Thomas Graves Law, had been gravely ill for much of his final years in office, and Edmond was faced by considerable arrears in fundamental library administration as a consequence – incomplete periodical runs, hundreds of books on loan yet unrecalled (he had reduced this to about twenty within months of his arrival) and an entire new extension to the Library that required populating – with the books transferred to it recatalogued according to the Dewey System. He oversaw redecoration of parts of the Library, and introduced display cabinets to the Upper Hall so that historical materials could be displayed to visitors for the first time.
His death in January 1906 left – and leaves – a terrible sense of what might have been. He was a great figure within the series of scholar-librarians at the Signet Library, but had almost no time to bring his great organising intelligence and vision to bear on the Library’s rich historical collections.