Dundee is today probably Scotland’s fourth city in terms of overall wealth. Four hundred years ago it would have been second, after Edinburgh. As the town clerk Alexander Wedderburn rhymed of his burgh in the 1590s: ‘Looke Albiones Ile all through | Is none lyik the [i.e. ‘thee’, Dundee] saiff [i.e. except] Lundone & Edinbrough’. At that time Dundee’s population was around 10,000, and the burgh boasted the tallest kirk in the country, as well as a thriving grammar school. But trade was its heart, because of its ideal situation on the Tay. As the Neo-Latin poet John Johnston wrote: ‘Hic facili excipiens venientes littore puppes | Indigenis vasti distrahit orbis opes’ (‘This place, receiving ships arriving into its easy harbour, | Divides among its people the riches of the whole world’).
Dundee was large enough that its kirk and mercantile elites, or at least some of them, must have been keen readers in several languages. They must have owned, lent, and discussed books. But evidence for this has been harder to marshal than for many other prominent Scottish towns, because Dundee had no bookshops and no printers. Nor was there a university, and it was not an ecclesiastical centre. There was almost no aristocracy. So the documentary traces for the ‘book economy’ of Dundee in the early modern period are rather scattered. But the combination of a busy grammar school and a wealthy merchant class made for a perhaps surprisingly learned locale, assisted by its maritime connections to France, the Low Countries, and the towns of the Hanseatic League. Henry Scrimgeour (1505–1572), for instance, the book agent for the all-powerful bankers the Fuggers of Augsburg, was a product of the Dundee grammar school, and a very significant collector in his own right, especially of Greek manuscripts. We can catch glimpses of the school in this period through the few surviving books of the schoolmaster Thomas MakGibbon (d. 1596), including a splendid example in Dundee’s Central Library today, editions bound together of Herodian (1539) and Quintilian (1544), with the owner’s name stamped in gold on the cover. A handwritten inscription shows that this book then passed to MakGibbon’s nephew James Robertson (1555–1623), minister of the second charge.
We know of several other libraries too. In 1578, the Dundee scholar and poet Hercules Rollock (c. 1546–1599) wrote to Sir Peter Young, the royal tutor and librarian (and Scrimgeour’s nephew), that he was anticipating a delivery of books by boat from Flanders, and that Young, himself a native of the town, should feel free to visit him and make use of his library. One book of his survives, today in Glasgow, a Latin history of the papacy which he sold to Alexander Hume of Polwarth in 1596. Another Dundonian who must have had an impressive library, now all lost, is the physician David Kinloch (1560–1617), a learned man of international standing, who published a medical poem on procreation, De hominis procreatione, anatome, ac morbis internis (Paris, 1596), reprinted in the famous Delitiae poetarum Scotorum (1637).
The most interesting library we know of in Jacobean Dundee, however, was that of the merchant David Wedderburne (1587–1630), yet another member of this central Dundee family. For Wedderburne kept in his ‘Compt Buik’ notes of his book loans, and these provide some of the most fascinating insights into literary culture in the whole region in the period. For Wedderburne had books in English, in French, in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, simple books, scholar’s books, illustrated books, coloured books, books finely bound; in genre he lent out Scottish chronicles, emblem books, Homer in Greek, bibles in Hebrew and Latin, books on navigation, an atlas, large law books, and some popular literature including ‘Dr Faustus’. The range of his borrowers is equally striking: fellow burgesses, two physicians, a bishop, several of the local ministers, men and women, young and old, and at least five of his borrowers lived across the Tay in Fife. He even sent two books to Stockholm to be traded there. Again, his library has all but disappeared today, but his 1551 ‘Matthew Bible’ survives in Glasgow. Despite the loss of his actual books, his lending records preserve vividly for us an otherwise intangible Tayside reading community of young and old, clergy and laity, men and women, in all sorts of languages and subjects.
Such collections numbered in the hundreds rather than the thousands of books, but even without an embedded local book-trade, some sense of the potential upper size of such private collections is given by what is probably the earliest record of a book auction in Dundee, namely the library of Sir Alexander Wedderburn of Blackness, auctioned in Dundee in April 1710. It contained almost a thousand books. Such is the precariousness of our evidence that we know of this from one surviving catalogue, now in Aberdeen, but, rather remarkably, annotated with the names of all the buyers. This would make a fascinating study.
Inevitably much smaller, but perhaps the most arresting collection of books in seventeenth-century Dundee, however, was the cache of oriental manuscript assembled by James Watson (d. 1677), son of the burgh provost, who spent several years in the Near East where, having become fluent in Turkish and Arabic, he worked as a kind of book runner in the bazaars of Istanbul, returning to Dundee with manuscripts in Turkish, Persian, Arabic, and Coptic, languages presumably only legible to him in Dundee. Did his burgh friends marvel at these strange objects? The Bodleian Library in Oxford attempted to buy Watson’s manuscript collection from his father after his untimely death, but the old provost asked too much for them, there was no response, and thereafter the exotic manuscripts of James Watson disappear.
I want to spend the second half of this piece, however, focusing on the burgh library itself, the very extensive collection of books kept in St Mary’s, for the use of the ministers and other literate members of the community. This library has long been known to antiquaries of the burgh, but it has somewhat dropped out of wider consciousness. It was founded no later than 1599, the earliest inscribed date of donation on a surviving book, it makes an appearance in several scattered town council minutes over the next century, it is remembered in several Dundee testaments, it was catalogued several times, of which now only a 1724 handwritten shelf-list survives, and the books were refurbished with gilt titles and ‘Dundee’ stamps in the 1690s and given their own Dundee bookplates in the next century. But the main reason why so little is said about this library is because almost all of it went up in flames in 1841. Then in 1908 the city librarian, Alexander Hastie Millar (1847–1927), received an astonishing letter from Australia. The letter, from a schoolmaster, told of how a battered hand-written catalogue of the Dundee library from 1724 had been presented to him by a ‘poor labourer’, who had got it from the property of a Dundonian who had sought his fortune in Australia in the previous generation. The schoolmaster wrote to Dundee, Millar offered to purchase it, and after several years it made the long journey home, the precious record of a long-gone library. Some of the older Dundonians just remembered tales of it. Maxwell, in his still indispensable Old Dundee of 1884, recalled: ‘A friend tells us that, when he was a boy, the Church beadle sometimes entertained him in the old vestry by opening up black letter volumes and exhibiting their curious and grotesque pictures’.
So what can we know about the origin and development of this lost library? As I mentioned, not all the books were destroyed in the fire that ruined the central kirks in 1841. Some must have been on loan or in the hands of the ministers, because in the Central Library today there exists a very small number of books we can show to have been in the early collections. The two earliest by provenance are large folio volumes from the same sixteenth-century edition of St Augustine, indeed even in the same binding, of which one volume was given by the minister of the first charge, William Christison, in 1599, and the other in 1622 by Sir Peter Young, whom we encountered earlier. What we learn from these inscriptions is that the library was originally under control of the kirk rather than the council, and on the evidence we have it is plausible to conjecture that Christison himself was the originator of the enterprise, having heard of similar library ventures just commenced in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. We also learn that both donors gave more books, and that there was a catalogue to record such donations.
Later, the minister Samuel Johnson, he who made the 1724 catalogue, added at the end of his list some notes on provenances he had spotted when recataloguing the collection. These final pages are badly damaged, but they furnish us with priceless details of the earliest history of this library. So we read, for instance, of books presented by James Anderson, minister of Stirling and a Scots devotional poet; by William Ferguson, a local physician, brother-in-law to the poet Kinloch; and by James Blair, minister at Lundie, north-west of Dundee. Other sources tell us that a further donor was Patrick Young, son of Sir Peter, and himself royal librarian and one of the most important Greek scholars of his age. Another very significant donor was the physician and Neo-Latin poet Peter Goldman, who in his testament left his entire learned library to the kirk when he died in 1627. Later in the century one Kinloch left around 2,000 books in 1673; John Spalding, another minister, fixed the books in the 1690s, and then one Alexander Lindsay, d. 1721, a native of the burgh but a minister in Essex in adulthood, left his whole library to be shipped back by sea to his native town. I slightly doubt that Kinloch’s books made it, but Lindsay’s certainly did, and this explains why a library on the banks of the Tay in the early eighteenth century was so replete with recent London books of vernacular theology almost entirely of an episcopalian rather than presbyterian worldview.
What can we know of the use of this library? Mentions in the minutes of the town council show that control of the books quite quickly passed to them, and the ‘kirkmaister’, a burgh official, thereafter oversaw the running of the library. Rules for use were laid down in 1636, from which we can see that it was ‘ministeris, scholleirs and studentis within this burgh [that] have the maist frequent wse of the saidis bookes’. The books could evidently be borrowed on pledge. A later order from 1676 affirms that no book was to be lent ‘without a ticket obleidging the borrower to delyver it back vnder a penaltie’. This probably does make the Dundee kirk ‘bibliotheck’ the earliest Scottish lending library, not Innerpeffray in Perthshire, as we are usually told.
What of the books themselves, though? The library by the time of Johnson’s catalogue was around 2,000 titles strong, stored in three quite high presses probably arranged as three sides of a square. It was a learned library, roughly balanced between what we can call ‘Arts’ books and ‘Theology’ books. The books came from seventy-seven different printing centres across Europe, and although the concentration as the library stood in the early eighteenth century was largely on English vernacular books from London, in its earlier phases the library was more continental, heavy in Greek and Latin editions of all kinds of books. The earliest accurately dated printed book comes from 1483. (Not quite as old as a 1475 bible in the Central Library today, surely one of the oldest printed books in Scotland, but I have not managed to establish its provenance.) There is not much ‘reading for pleasure’ here, unlike, say, the great library of William Drummond of Hawthornden or that of Sir John Scot of Scotstarvit across the Tay, and the learned books are not quite as learned as those of the ‘Leighton Library’ of Bishop Leighton over in Dunblane, operational from 1688. But the range is still deeply impressive, from biblical and patristic literature to modern divinity, from geographical and historical literature to recent works of experimental philosophy, from classical authors to some modern literary writers, but with almost no English literature represented at all. Scottish printing was barely showing its head at this time, but there are a fair number of Aberdeen, Glasgow, and Edinburgh imprints.
The Dundee ‘bibliotheck’ suffered its own biblioclasm at the hands of a new gas heating system. But despite the loss of the books, the traces in burgh documents and testaments illuminate a book-rich world, at least for those who could read, and I am hopeful that more research into the private libraries of this remarkable borough will help to reaffirm just how important a cultural centre Dundee was in this period, and how we must include this in any appraisal of the wider cultural attainments of early modern Scotland.
References:
Alexander Maxwell, The History of Old Dundee, Narrated out of the Town Council Register, with Additions from Contemporary Annals (Edinburgh: David Douglas; and Dundee: William Kidd, 1884)
A. H. Millar, ed., The Compt Buik of David Wedderburne Merchant of Dundee 1587–1630 (Scottish Historical Society, 1898), esp. pp. xxi-xxxii for the loans.
William Poole, The Life, Letters, and Poems of Peter Goldman (1587/8–1627) (D. S. Brewer, 2024)
William Poole, The Dundee Bibliotheck, 1599–1724 (Brill, 2026)
Mhairi Winfield, ‘Centres of Print in a Peripheral Scottish Library: The Library of Dundee’s Catalogue from 1724’, blog post of [2025] for the USTC at https://www.ustc.ac.uk/news/centres-of-print-in-a-peripheral-scottish-library-the-library-of-dundees-catalogue-from-1724
