October 2024 will be remembered at the WS Society for an extraordinary story of lost and found. It centres on the first book on economics owned by the Signet Library, Sir James Steuart’s two volume Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy, printed in London in 1767. At the time, the work was a real pioneer, and it’s now considered to be the first full treatise on economics to be published. Steuart himself was the grandson of Lord Advocate Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees, Thomas Aitkenhead’s executioner. He was a Jacobite who’d spent time with the exiled Scottish court at Rome, and he’d rejoin the diaspora for a further decade in the aftermath of the 1745.
Because Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations followed so soon after Steuart’s opus – and argued against it so strongly - the work has been undervalued in the world of Anglophone scholarship. However it was admired by the German philosopher Hegel, and the first Dictionary of National Biography relented sufficiently as to describe it as the most complete and systematic survey of the science from the point of view of moderate mercantilism which had appeared in England. The Signet Library is believed to have acquired our fine copy of it during the late 1780s under the great Deputy Keeper of the Scottish Enlightenment John Davidson, two full bound volumes with gold tooling and decorative endpapers. It is present in the first printed catalogue of 1792.
The two volumes came over to the new Signet Library with the rest of the collection in 1815, and from 1833 their home would be Upper Library Gallery case PP, northwest of the Cupola. And there they remained until, on the afternoon of 12th April 1978, volume 2 of the set - erroneously included in Lot 386 of the Sotheby’s Sale - was alienated from its partner and sent into exile. Volume 1 found itself alone on a new shelf under the north side Cupola with the loss of its partner memorialised in a mournful label gummed onto its endpaper.
Forty-six years later, the missing volume of the set was placed in auctioneer Dominic Winter’s October Printed Books, Maps and Playing Cards sale as Lot 261. Alyssa Popiel, curator and author of A Capital View: The Art of Edinburgh (2014), spotted the sale and alerted the Society. With Chief Executive Robert Pirrie leading the bidding, we succeeded in reacquiring the volume and completing our set once more of this vital early work.
The story of the book won’t end there: the return of the second volume has thrown up more that demands investigation. Although the two volumes share the same Georgian binding and endpapers, the WS Society book stamp on the boards of the first volume is the “short lions” stamp of 1800-1815, whereas the second volume carries the earlier “fleur de lys” stamp of 1722-1800. It is not clear why this should be so, nor why the leather spine title labels were altered from reading “Stuart’s Inquiry” to the longer “Stuart’s Political Oeconomy” which again happened at an early stage in the life of the book. Research continues.
