Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750-1820

“[This] book is a triumph. Towsey’s primary research is both impressively detailed and extraordinarily wide-ranging, even by the high standards of studies in this field generally.”
Matthew Bradley, Pembroke College, Oxford. In: Library & Information History, Vol. 27, No. 3 (September 2011), pp. 199-200.

"Towsey pays particular attention to letters, diaries, marginalia and commonplace books. On all these matters he is a splendid mine of well-structured information [...]. In this exhaustively researched book Towsey provides a most persuasive argument for the claim that the works of the literati reached deep into Scottish society, not only in the university towns but across Scotland more generally, and that the books of the literati were not just accessible, but accessed and interpreted."
Alexander Broadie, University of Glasgow. In: The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 2 (2012), pp. 365-367.

"This book gets to the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment ... [Towsey] convincingly sets out his methodologies, provides detailed evidence to support them, and develops and provides new insights into our knowledge and understanding of the social impact of the Scottish Enlightenment in provincial Scotland."
Heather Holmes, Journal of the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society.

"The story Towsey tells here is intellectually compelling, even moving."
Stephen W. Brown, Trent University, Ontario. In: The Library, 7.13.3 (September 2012). pp. 347-349.