Edinburgh was an Enlightenment city of regional, national and global influence. But how did the people of Enlightenment Edinburgh understand and order their world? How did they encounter, compare and produce different kinds of spaces, from the urban to the world scale? And how did this city set the universal standards by which other places should be judged and transformed? The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh answers these questions by exploring the thousands of urban plans, county surveys, travel accounts and encyclopaedias that passed through a busy Edinburgh bookshop over four decades. It reveals how these geographical publications were produced and shared, and sheds light on the people who bought and used them - including moral philosophers, silk merchants, school teachers, ship's surgeons and slave owners. This is the story of how specific methods of mapping space came ultimately to predict and organize it, creating a new world in Edinburgh's image. By connecting global processes of knowledge production to intimate accounts of its reception in the city, this book deepens our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and the world it made.

The Missing Monument Murders is a veiled story of power, wealth, dark deeds and intrigue. In 1806, Jane Austen’s relative, the Reverend Thomas Leigh, came into vast estates and the mood in the extended Leigh/Austen family was jubilant. But within a few years, bizarre events were the talk of the district: the removal and destruction of monuments in the village church, cheating, blackmail, and the eviction of tenants who dared speak of events. It would even be alleged that the family engaged in murder to protect their inheritance. Judy Stove’s painstaking research pieces together for the first time in detail the full story, in which whistle blower Charles Griffin, a local solicitor, ended up in gaol. Whether scandal-mongering or clever and powerful suppression at a time when criminal investigations were all but non-existent, the truth remains a mystery. One that touched on Austen’s own world and in which connections not just to the great and the good but to some of her characters, plots and personal life unfold. Author Judy Stove is an academic based at the University of New South Wales, a role she balances with working in school administration. After studying classics at the University of Sydney, she worked for the Australian Commonwealth Departments of Defence and Finance. She is married with two adult sons, and is an active member of the Jane Austen Society of Australia.

Since the middle of the eighteenth century, political thinkers of all kinds — radical and reactionary, professional and amateur — have been complaining about “bureaucracy.” But what, exactly, is all this complaining about? The Demon of Writing is a critical history and theory of one of the most ubiquitous, least understood forms of media: paperwork. States rely on records to tax and spend, protect and serve, discipline and punish. But time and again this paperwork proves to be unreliable. Examining episodes from the story of a clerk who lost his job and then his mind in the French Revolution to Roland Barthes’s brief stint as a university administrator, the book reveals the powers, failures, and even pleasures of paperwork. Many of its complexities, the book argues, have been obscured by the comic-paranoid style that characterizes so many of our criticisms of bureaucracy. At the same time, the book outlines a new theory of what Marx called the “bureaucratic medium.” Returning first to Marx, then to Freud, The Demon of Writing argues that this theory of paperwork must be attentive to both praxis and parapraxis.