Industrious bees & thistle.

A New Lottery Book, page 45.

In the early nineteenth-century, Edinburgh was an active centre of British chapbook publishing due to its publishing, printing and paper industries. There was mutual cross-border trade between Northern England and Scotland, and also, a vigorous book trade between Edinburgh and London. Within Scotland, Edinburgh and Glaswegian printers and publishers co-operated on joint ventures in the chapbook trade.

The Edinburgh publishers are identified on the chapbooks in this exhibit. G. Ross published The Royal Alphabet in 1815. Caw and Elder published the chapbooks, A New Lottery Book and The Rise of Learning in 1819. Both of these publishers produced a Juvenile Library series of children’s chapbooks that were sold for twopence.